Measuring Social Synchrony And Stress In The Handler-Dog Dyad During Animal Assisted Activities: A Pilot Study

Synchrony – the coordination of behavior between interacting partners – is a complex phenomenon requiring the perception and integration of multimodal communicative signals. Originally conceptualized by developmental psychologists to study the human-human relationship, it could also apply to cross-species interactions. Here we examined synchrony patterns as a potentially important mechanism to evaluate human-dog interactions during animal assisted activities (AAA). Four dog handler-dog dyads were videotaped before (T0), during (T1) and after (T2) 45-minute sessions of AAA and coded for the following synchrony patterns: gaze synchrony (GS), joint attention (JA), and touch synchrony (TS).
Source: Journal of Veterinary Behavior: Clinical Applications and Research - Category: Veterinary Research Authors: Source Type: research