Cat People Are More Neurotic Than Dog People—What a New Study Says · Kinship Leave a comment

“Are you a canine individual or a cat individual?” This very query tells us what we expect we have to find out about another person inside seconds (or so we expect). Truly, there seems to be some fact to that. Researchers Jessica Oliva Baines and Leah Michelle Baines did a examine, printed within the multidisciplinary journal Anthrozoös final 12 months that proves there’s something to this “us verses them” idea.

Oliva and co-author Leah Michelle Baines surveyed 329 contributors, to see if canine mother and father and cat mother and father displayed totally different ranges of resilience, openness to expertise, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. “We additionally needed to check non-owners,” Oliva tells Kinship. “However our pattern of non-owners was too small to make this comparability, so we simply caught to [owners of] cats [versus] canine.”

Previous scholarship already signifies that cat folks have a tendency to attain larger for neuroticism, for instance, so Oliva and Baines anticipated to repeat that end result. Ultimately, they have been proper: Cat mother and father did rating larger than canine mother and father on the neuroticism chart. Earlier than you get offended, cat mother and father, please learn on for context.

Cat folks are usually neurotic, or so the analysis says.

Their examine cites analysis from 1980 that in contrast persona traits of various pet mother and father. Through the years, some students have echoed each other’s findings. Whereas conducting analysis for his 2000 e book, Why We Love Canines the Method We Do, psychology professor and canine professional Stanley Coren surveyed 6,149 folks to check personalities of canine mother and father, cat mother and father, and folk who stay with out pets. Finally, he discovered that respondents who lived with canine have been extra extroverted and accepting, whereas these with cats for roommates tended to be extra introverted and fewer agreeable.

Ten years after Coren’s e book debuted, Sam Gosling, a College of Texas at Austin psychologist, carried out his personal survey of 4,565 volunteers utilizing his personal questions and noticed related outcomes. (Forty-six p.c of Gosling’s respondents described themselves as “canine folks,” whereas 12 p.c known as themselves “cat folks”; 28 p.c recognized as “each” and 15 p.c as “neither.”) 

In Gosling’s examine, canine mother and father scored larger than cat mother and father for extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. In the meantime, cat folks got here out on prime for each openness and neuroticism — hey, having a balanced persona is wholesome.

Canine persons are extra resilient.

All of this began with — not a shock — a distinct examine. A couple of years in the past, throughout COVID-19 lockdown, Oliva needed to learn how dwelling with a pet impacted loneliness. A number of research later, the James Prepare dinner College psychology researcher has discovered statistically important motive to consider that canine folks are usually extra resilient than cat folks. The rationale for this hyperlink, nevertheless, stays a little bit of a thriller.

Oliva’s 2020 examine (about loneliness), co-authored with Kim Louise Johnston, discovered that canine individuals who lived alone have been much less lonely than others who lived alone with out a canine — whether or not they had different, non-canine pets or not. “Frequency of pet interactions didn’t clarify these findings,” Oliva says. “So, we assumed that the canine have been performing as a form of ‘social catalyst.’”

As somebody who first adopted a canine within the hopes of spending extra time exterior, this logic appears sound to me. However that truly doesn’t jive with Oliva’s subsequent analysis. When Oliva and Johnston investigated the connection between canine strolling and loneliness, they discovered no important hyperlink.

“So, then we began to assume that possibly there was one thing inherent about being somebody that likes to personal canine that additionally makes them extra resilient to demanding conditions, like extended social isolation,” she says. “Which gave us the concept to check persona profiles of canine house owners, cat house owners, and non-owners [in the 2024 study].” 

Which got here first: a resilient pet father or mother, or a calm-inducing canine?

Oliva and Baines’s outcomes appear to fall according to prior analysis, however the students additionally acknowledge that their information set comes with one main limitation. As a result of they surveyed their topics solely as soon as, versus on a number of events over time, “it’s not potential to know which comes first, the proprietor’s persona or the pet.” 

In different phrases, Oliva and Baines ran right into a little bit of a “the rooster or the egg” state of affairs. Do individuals who select canine as pets are usually extra steady in periods of stress, or does dwelling with canine make pet mother and father extra resilient over time? To seek out that out, we’d want extra analysis — particularly, a longitudinal examine (aka a examine that observes the identical variables as time passes).

For now, that’ll have to attend. Oliva is already onerous at work on a distinct long-term examine in partnership with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, “taking a look at how the bond between house owners of canine and cats develops over the primary 12 months put up adoption.”

Oliva will test in with topics who’ve just lately adopted pets on the three-month, six-month, and one-year marks to look at how their psychological well being modifications over time, as indicated by despair, stress, and nervousness scores. She plans to publish the outcomes subsequent 12 months. 

References

• Baines, Leah Michelle, and Jessica Lee Oliva. “Unleashing the Persona Divide: Resilience in Canine Homeowners, Neuroticism in Cat Homeowners.” Anthrozoös, 29 July 2024, pp. 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2024.2378592.

• Oliva, Jessica Lee, and Kim Louise Johnston. “Pet Love within the Time of Corona: Canine Possession Protects towards Loneliness for These Dwelling Alone through the COVID-19 Lockdown.” Worldwide Journal of Social Psychiatry, vol. 67, no. 3, 23 July 2020, p. 002076402094419, journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0020764020944195, https://doi.org/10.1177/0020764020944195.