Social Relationships Lab

People and their Pets: Exploring the Role of Attachment on Pet Adoption

The relationships people have with pets is beneficial in a variety of ways, including using pets as attachment figures. Although researchers have commonly studied attachment styles to better understand feelings and thoughts on interpersonal relationships, it has been found applicable to the person-pet relationships as well. However, we know of no work that has looked at how attachment influences the decision to adopt a pet initially. To explore this idea, we conducted a study to better understand why people adopted a pet and determine if attachment styles were related to these reasons. A sample of 168 pet owners were given questionnaires to evaluate attachment styles and the reasons why they chose to adopt a newly acquired pet. We expected that the reasons people had for adopting pets would be related to anxious and avoidant attachment styles. Implications for human-animal interventions and future research are discussed.

Click here for a PDF of the poster.