For college students, stress relief can take many forms online: shopping, ordering food, gaming with friends and meeting new romantic partners. And now they can add hanging out with therapy dogs to that list. Virtual canine comfort is emerging as a successful way for students to reduce their stress as they interact with therapy dog-handler teams.

Because they are nonjudgmental, engaging and welcoming, interacting with therapy dogs can be used as a complementary intervention that reduces student stress which may encourage students to seek more formal support services if needed. Once introduced on campus, the interest from students typically surpasses most programs’ abilities to meet the demand.

Even prior to COVID-19, being a college student was considered a stressful experience; college administrators have increasingly been seeking innovative ways to encourage students to safeguard their mental health. Spending time with therapy dogs is one proactive way for students to chip away at potentially debilitating levels of heightened stress.

Virtual support
In-person canine visitation programs or canine-assisted interventions are themselves a relatively new way for students to enhance their well-being. Programs such as the University of British Columbia’s Building Academic Retention through K9s (B.A.R.K.) program at the Okanagan campus was established in 2012 as a way for students to reduce their homesickness, decrease their stress and foster interpersonal connections.

Several randomized controlled trials out of the B.A.R.K. lab, and elsewhere, now attest to the efficacy of spending time with therapy dogs to elicit a host of well-being outcomes.

Restrictions on in-person sessions saw the B.A.R.K. program collaborate with human-animal interaction researcher Christine Tardif-Williams’ pre-recorded virtual canine comfort modules.

Read more: https://theconversation.com/online-sessions-with-therapy-dogs-can-help-students-feel-less-stressed-182554