The Surprising Link Between Pet Attachment and Mental Health

Can you be too attached to your pet? In a Psychology Today article called “How Our Bonds with Pets Support Mental Health,” Jason Shimiaie argues that strong attachments to dogs provide important mental health benefits for their owners.

Indeed, many of the pet owners I know are both psychologically healthy and deeply attached to their companion animals. Yet decades of research on the human-animal bond suggest a complex picture of the link between attachment to pets and psychological well-being.

Over the past 40 years, more than 100 research studies have been published on the link between pet attachment and mental health. The results of these studies have been mixed. For example, a 2021 study reported that high attachment to companion animals was associated with reduced risk of suicide in pet owners. However, a careful long-term 2025 study of 600 older adults in Baltimore led by Erika Friedmann and Nancy Gee found that owners who were more strongly bonded to their pets experienced greater declines in well-being over time than less attached pet owners.

How can we make sense of this pattern of discrepant findings? A research team led by Katherine Northrope of La Trobe University reviewed 130 peer-reviewed studies on pet attachment and mental health published between 1983 and 2024. Most of the papers focused on the association between the strength of the bond between owners and their pet’s mental health. The others examined the connection between different styles of pet attachment and mental health. Their results were recently published in the journal Animals.

How Is the Strength of the Pet-Owner Bond Linked to Mental Health?

One hundred fourteen studies explored the connection between how attached people felt to their pets and their mental health. The researchers found surprisingly little support for the claim that strong bonds to pets make for better mental health.

For example, in 33 of the studies, there was no relationship between the strength of the human-pet bond and mental health. And while 27 studies found that high pet attachment was linked to better scores on some mental health measures, 48 studies reported that stronger bonds with pets were associated with worse scores on some or all mental health measures. In short, among more than 100 studies, null and negative findings were considerably more common than positive ones.

The results of studies on pet attachment and mental health.

Source: Graph by Hal Herzog

The studies of older pet owners illustrate this pattern of mixed results. Only two of 14 studies of elderly owners found that stronger bonds with pets were tied to better mental health. But six studies found that the highly attached pet owners had more psychological problems. In the rest of the studies, pet attachment had no impact on mental health.

The good news is that the researchers concluded that high attachment to pets is associated with better psychological well-being in children. The bad news is that in many of the studies, strong attachments to pets were associated with more serious forms of psychological distress.

A 2024 systematic review on pet attachment and depression by University of Edinburgh researchers found the same pattern. While four of the studies found that highly attached owners were less depressed, 12 of them reported that stronger pet-bonds were associated with depression, and 14 studies found no relationship between attachment and depression.

How is the Style of the Owner-Pet Bond Linked to Mental Health?

Pet owners have different types of relationships with their companion animals. Some owners are “securely attached” to their pets, while others are “insecurely attached.”

Source: Graph by Hal Herzog

The Pet Attachment Questionnaire is a 26-item scale that measures individual differences in the types of bonds owners have with companion animals. It is based on John Bowlby’s model of human-to-human attachment styles.

Pet owners who are clingy and demand a lot of attention from their pet score high on the “anxiety subscale” of the questionnaire. Pet owners who are aloof and emotionally distant from their pets score high on the “avoidant” subscale. Owners who score high on one or both of these measures are considered insecurely attached to their pets.

Northrope and her colleagues located 14 studies that investigated how these differences in pet-attachment styles were related to the mental health of owners. In 11 of the 14 studies, high scores on the anxiety scale were associated with poor mental health.

For example, a study of 500 Australian pet owners found that high pet-anxiety owners were more likely to suffer from depression, stress, anxiety, and generally poor mental health. In contrast, only five of the 14 studies found links between avoidant pet attachment and measures of mental health.

Attachment Essential Reads

Your Past Relationships May Control Your Present Reality

The Danger of Weaponized Attachment

And the connection between anxious attachment and poor mental health was further solidified by a 2025 study of 600 young adult pet owners. These researchers reported that among dog owners, anxious attachment was associated with poorer mental health, but that avoidant dog and cat owners tended to be psychologically better off.

The Why Question

The bottom line is that most research does not support the idea that attachments to pets usually boost their owners' mental health. Indeed, contrary to conventional wisdom and Jason Shimiaie's Psychology Today post, an impressive body of research indicates that strong bonds with pets are more likely to be linked to poor mental health.

Why is this the case? Do pet owners who are anxious in their relationships with other people transfer their insecure attachment styles to their interactions with their pets? Do highly attached owners turn to companion animals for social and emotional support because they have fewer friends? Can pets be a cause of social isolation? (Friemann and Gee noted that pet ownership might reduce participation in social activities like visiting friends or traveling.)

In a 2025 study, Jaining Li and Nichol Li found that pet owners who relied heavily on their pets as substitutes for human relationships were more likely to be lonely and suffer from low psychological well-being. They wrote, “While pets can provide emotional support and companionship, it is essential to avoid excessive reliance on pets as substitutes for human interactions.”

That sounds like good advice to me.