Animal-assisted therapy in psychiatric rehabilitation

Reviews of animal-assisted therapy (AAT) research suggest the need for bett er controlled and designed research studies to supplement the many case stu dies and anecdotal reports. This study reports the results of such an inves tigation where sixty-nine male and female psychiatric inpatients were rando mized to either an AAT psychiatric rehabilitation group or a similarly cond ucted control group without AAT, to test if AAT can improve prosocial behav iors. The Social Behavior Scale was scored daily by an independent rater an d patients were monitored for four weeks. A two-group by weeks repeated mea sure analysis of variance was conducted for each outcome measure. There wer e no baseline differences between the two groups an demographics or any of the measures, but by week four, patients in the AAT group were significantl y more interactive with other patients, scored higher on measures of smiles and pleasure, were more sociable and helpful with others, and were more ac tive and responsive to surroundings. These data suggest that AAT plays an i mportant role in enhancing the benefits of conventional therapy, and demons trates the benefit of including a non-AAT group for comparison. The study a lso demonstrates the importance of using longitudinal, repeated measure des igns. Previous studies may have failed to find significant effects because they were restricted to shorter intervals for measuring outcomes. (C) 2000 International Society for Anthrozoology.