Last year I rented an old terraced house near the university. Every day I'd walk through the local park to get to my office on campus. And every day I'd pass by a lot of people on the way. People like me walking briskly to work and glancing at their watches, out-of-breath joggers pausing on the walkways, toddlers pulling up grass, students on benches studying for their morning exams, old men with their heads down lost in conversation, maintenance men with overflowing wheelbarrows. You get the idea. The place was buzzing with human activity. The thing is, these people might as well have been fire hydrants, broken tree branches, or trash bins since they registered about as much in my consciousness as these things.
In fact, surprisingly scant experimental work has been done on the role of dogs as social catalysts. One exception to this is a recent study in the Journal of Communication Disorders by speech-language pathologist Caroline LaFrance and her colleagues. In this study, the authors reported a single case study of a 61-year-old accident victim who'd suffered a serious brain injury resulting in non-fluent aphasia. The man had volunteered for a new animal-assisted therapy program at a rehabilitation center in Ottawa, Canada and was paired with a handler and her friendly, 5-year-old Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever named Paugan. Initial assessment of the patient indicated significant impairment; for example, the man had difficulty carrying out simple instructions (e.g., pointing to objects in the room, doing things in sequential order) and his "yes/no" responses were no greater than chance.
There were three "conditions" of the experiment. Condition A lasted for two weeks and was simply the baseline period without the handler or dog. Condition B constituted weeks 3 and 4, and involved the handler only (who was also a trained speech pathologist) and not the dog. Finally, Condition C lasted the next five weeks, and here the man was paired with the dog and the handler. The final two weeks of the study reverted back to Condition A, where the handler and dog were removed. What the authors found, as you might suspect, is that when Paugan was at the man's side, he laughed more, attempted to verbalize more, expressed more automatic speech, produced more words, utterances, and sentences, smiled more, gestured to communicate more, nodded his head more, and made more eye contact with the handler, staff, and the other patients. Furthermore, at his hospital discharge twelve weeks later, the man's cognitive skills had improved to normal levels (though of course we can't conclude from this that the animal-therapy program alone was responsible for this improvement). The authors write that, "in the presence of the therapy dog, impressions are that [the patient] became more animated and outgoing; he willingly introduced the animal to curious strangers who approached to pat the dog or ask questions about the dog's breed or personality" and conclude that "the presence of a therapy dog may be a catalyst to improve both verbal and nonverbal communication skills" for aphasic patients.
Based on my own everyday (non-aphasic) experiences with Gulliver, I'm inclined to agree. He's not that cute little puppy in the video anymore, but he's still full of rambunctious charm and occasionally shoehorns himself into a passing stranger's life. Unfortunately, now it's usually muddying someone's clothes by jumping up on them, and these days I'm getting more dirty looks than smiles. Time for obedience school, Gulliver!
