New U of A tool decodes pet talk and may help explain how pets affect our well-being

Every "good girl," every "who wants a treat," every one-sided debate with the cat – University of Arizona researchers have found a way to measure it all. 

The researchers developed the first reliable tool to analyze how people talk to their pets on a day-to-day basis. They found that one-tenth of the total time that pet owners spend talking is with their pets, and that no two owners sound quite alike. These findings may hold clues to why pets affect the well-being of some owners more than others. 

"So many people who own a pet say, 'I know this pet makes a difference in my life,' and yet the studies keep coming up mixed," said Dr. Emily Bray, the study's senior author and an assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine. "We need objective data on what people are actually saying and how they are interacting with their pets to begin exploring why."

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, is a collaboration between the U of A College of Veterinary Medicine and the Department of Psychology. 

The tool developed for the study, called AURAL-Pet – short for Audio-based Understanding of Relational Animal-directed Language – is a coding system that comprises a checklist of different categories of human-animal interactions, such as praise, questions, commands and frustration. Using audio recordings of owners talking to pets while going about their daily routines, the researchers marked the categories as present or absent in each audio clip.

"We hope AURAL-Pet can be used in future studies to understand how differences in these interaction styles map onto mental health and well-being outcomes in humans," said Dara Jonkoski, the study's lead author and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology. 

The recordings revealed enormous variations in how people interacted with pets – for example, some people referred to the pet by a nickname in all their "pet talk" clips, whereas others never used a nickname. These differences may help solve a long-standing puzzle arising from decades of mixed findings around the "pet effect" – the idea that pets positively influence human health, Bray said. Some studies link pet ownership to less loneliness and depression, while others find little to no effect.

For this study, the researchers turned to the electronically activated recorder, or EAR – a smartphone application developed by the study's co-author Matthias Mehl, a professor in the Department of Psychology. Previously applied to questions related to other topics, such as agingand meditation, the EAR switches on at random moments throughout the day to record whatever is happening around the participant. Participants of the AURAL-Pet study consented to their recording being used for research purposes but never knew what the research question would be. 

"Very often in human-animal interaction studies, people sign up knowing the topic of the study is their relationship with their pets," Bray said. "So, right off the bat, you have a bit of a biased sample. In that regard, our study is as unbiased as it can get." 

The team identified 5,072 sound clips from four archival EAR studies in which a dog or cat could be heard or was mentioned. The clips were drawn from 240 participants. When two human coders independently scored the same clips using AURAL-Pet, 22 of the 23 yes-or-no variables proved reliable, meaning the coding system can be reliably applied in future studies involving human-pet interactions. 

When creating the coding system, the authors tried to capture aspects of human-animal interactions that might help explain the ways that pets can be beneficial – when pet presence is sparking conversations with other people, for example, or when pets are being treated as confidants.

"We hear a lot of really interesting things, like someone coming home from a rough day at work and telling their pet, 'You're always glad to see me – you always make me feel so good,'" Jonkoski said. 

The research team is now applying AURAL-Pet to another project called the C.A.R.E. study, led by Matthew Grilli and Jessica Andrews-Hanna, associate professors in the Department of Psychology. That study involves collecting a range of mental health and well-being data from adults over 60. AURAL-Pet may help psychology researchers understand how conversations with pets affect the well-being of the elderly. Bray said a pet could be taking the place of a social partner or act as a social catalyst, meaning the pet could help spark interactions between its owner and other people that might not have happened otherwise.

The tool's overall appeal, according to Bray, is that it captures raw behavior separate from what owners report on questionnaires. 

"We can get straight to human behavior, which I love as an animal behavior researcher," Bray said. "Humans are animals, too, right?"