Well, college and exams put together is the perfect recipe for stress amongst students. There have been cases of college dropouts due to stress and extreme ones include even suicidal thoughts or suicides due to the pressure of studies and clearing exams. There’s a bit of good news for students though. It’s about reducing exam stress by spending time with pet dogs or cats. Now, Who doesn’t like pets? But, did you know a study shows the psychological benefits of having pets at home? Yes, you read that right, a study has found that pets relieve exam stress and study-related pressures of students. The study was published in the AERA open journal that said, many universities have implemented programs like ‘pet your stress away’.
The study was based on a research involving 249 college students who were randomly divided into four groups. The first group got a chance to do hands-on interaction with pet cats and dogs for a duration of 10 minutes. In order to compare the results, the second group was just allowed to observe the first group petting animals. The third group, in turn, was shown a slide show of the animals that were petted and the last or fourth group was simply waitlisted. The students who waitlisted did so without having any stimuli like phone, book or more. To check for the results, the salivary cortisol samples of every participant was collected in the morning after they woke up and the data was crunched.
The results did show that the students who interacted with pets showed a reduction in stress levels because there was a visible reduction in cortisol hormones causing stress. Even if the time they spent with kids was as less as 10 minutes, it worked in reducing stress as per researchers. The objective of the research was to find out whether this kind of exposure would help in stress reduction by reducing hormone secretion related to stress. This paves the way to utilizing the same for benefitting mental health over a period of time.
*Sourced from the Internet
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