Argumentative Essay On Pet Therapy

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Owning or being around pets can be beneficial to anyone at any age. Since the 1970s, emphasis has been put on the use of pet therapy to help with many disorders and mental states (Moretti, 2011, p. 125). Everyone most likely has experienced stress in their life in one way or the other. Children, adults, and elderly all experience stress, though not to the same degree or from the same causes. Studies have been done on children and elderly patients to determine whether animal -assisted therapy is a good option to reduce stress and other mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, and dementia. A study done has proven that there was a significant improvement in children with several different disorders who were put into animal-assisted therapy (Tsai, 2010, p. 245). Elderly patients with dementia, anxiety, and depression also showed significant signs of improvement from pet therapy (Moretti, 2011, p. 128). College students experience a lot of stress from the pressure of school, jobs, and many other factors. Animal-assisted therapy could be a helpful tool in effectively decreasing stress levels of the students. This form of therapy has been used in many other studies, using several different populations, and observed to assess its usefulness several ways such as decreasing mental disorders, increasing moods, and lower blood pressure. Using pet therapy on college students to reduce anxiety and depression might be a good and interactive form of therapy.
Rachael A. Jasperson (2013) examined the effectiveness of animal-assisted therapy (AAT) on female inmates' levels of distress, interpersonal relationships, and social role performance. Using incarcerated women in the Utah State Prison, Jasperson (2013) investigated using an experimen...

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... in adults. Animal-assisted therapy could be used to help adults manage stress in a fun, new way. One threat to validity is that this is a small study and a few people dropped out in both groups which could affect results. In future studies, bigger groups of participants could be used and other therapies could be compared to the AAT.
Animal-assisted therapy could have a significant effect on people's wellbeing such as depression, anxiety, mental disorders, and overall happiness. Bigger and longer studies may help in representing results better than those listed. We will hope to conclude whether animal-assisted therapy is a good form of therapy to use on college students with anxiety and depression. It is hypothesized that college students placed in the animal-assisted therapy, compared to those in the control group, will show lower scores of anxiety and depression.

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