Do Dogs Really Influence How People Evaluate Psychotherapists? A Conceptual Replication Attempt

Abstract

The icebreaker effect – the idea that integrating animals into psychotherapy improves the therapeutic alliance – is believed to be one of the main mechanisms of action in animal-assisted psychotherapy. Support for this notion has come from preliminary evidence that the presence of a dog positively influences how people perceive psychotherapists. However, the robustness and generalizability of these findings have yet to be tested. Thus, in our study, we aimed to (1) conceptually replicate these results and (2) gain insight into what might drive them by employing a design with high experimental control. Four hundred and eighty-one participants took part in our experiment, in which they first watched a video of a psychotherapist introducing themself. In the video, we experimentally manipulated whether the psychotherapist had an additional qualification in animal-assisted therapy or in meditation techniques and mindfulness (as a control condition), whether the psychotherapist referred to this additional qualification in the video, whether this additional qualification was visible in the video (dog or meditation accessories visible), and the psychotherapist's gender. After watching the video, participants were asked to report on the anticipated therapeutic relationship, the perceived trustworthiness of the therapist, and their own willingness to self-disclose. None of our analyses yielded any evidence of positive effects from the presence of a dog in the video. Thus, we could not replicate the previous results. Given our design, we argue that our results suggest that it is neither the mere presence of the dog (i.e., the visibility of the dog in the video) nor the perception of the psychotherapist's ability to work with a dog as an additional qualification that drove the previously found positive effects. Instead, we discuss the idea that these positive effects might be due to (potentially unconscious) changes in psychotherapists’ behavior and performance when accompanied by a dog. We invite future research to investigate (1) the role that therapists’ behavioral changes due to the presence of a dog play and (2) under which circumstances these changes occur.