Effects of Novel Dog Exposure on College Students' Stress Prior to Examination

Higher education strives to provoke thinking, learning, and comprehensive success in its students. Quizzes and exams are often used to monitor and assess whether these goals have been reached but have also been shown to evoke test anxiety in students (Hembree, 1998). Test anxiety is a psychological construct that pairs with a student's concerns about the negative consequence of performing poorly and/or failing a test (Chapell, Blanding, Silverstein, Takahashi, Newman, Gubi, & McCann, 2005; Zeidner, 1998). A moderate level of test anxiety can be beneficial for success in academic achievement, but when the anxiety becomes excessive, academic assessment performance significantly decreases (Siddiqui & Rehman, 2014). Research has attempted to find cognitive behavioral practices to reduce test anxiety, including religious activities, exercise, breathing techniques, meditation, and cognitive restructuring. Likewise, trained therapy dogs have also been used to alleviate stress for college students linked to test anxiety (Barker, Barker, McCain, & Schubert, 2016). Von Bergen (2015) reported that dogs have been used for decades on campus for those requiring guide dogs or other service animals. Folse, Minder, Aycock, and Santana (1994) reported that trained therapy dogs were first introduced to American campuses and universities in the 1990s to accompany students diagnosed with depression. The self reported results of having therapy dogs with them on campus were beneficial in relieving depression symptoms. Recently, students diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and autism spectrum disorders have begun to petition colleges to allow trained therapy dogs on campuses to alleviate stress, loneliness, depression, and/or anxiety (Von Bergen, 2015). Bell (2013) highlighted that in American universities there was a strong correlation between student stress and the benefits of exposure to therapy dogs, causing some to actually begin implementation of programs whereby students can regularly engage with a therapy dog. Some universities have allowed students to check out dogs from their library with a self-reported 95% of students believing it to be an effective means for stress reduction (Jalongo & McDevitt, 2015). Daltry and Meher (2015) emphasized that trained therapy dogs on campuses have demonstrated to be particularly beneficial in alleviating stress and providing psychological comfort to university students. This stress can be caused by various situations, including test anxiety. Barker et al. (2016) showed that exposure to therapy dogs before exams reduced self-reported psychological test anxiety in college students. According to Dell, et al. (2015) nearly half of all 98 Canadian universities offer therapy dog programs during examination periods. Service and therapy dogs are becoming more prevalent in a variety of settings. Hall, Turner and Mills (2017) highlighted that working service dogs are professionally trained and screened and provided clearance in public places by the Americans with Disabilities Act. This mandates that they be extensively trained and insured. Bowers (2013) also reported that therapy dogs must be professionally trained and it is recommended that an accredited training organization perform that training. This usually consists of obedience classes as well as professional dog training, costing thousands of dollars. Considering this, trained therapy dogs can be inaccessible for small, private universities in North America. This can be due to limited ownership budget, training/acquiring expense, or rural locations with limited availability of therapy dogs to remote areas. To confront this problem, our purpose was to examine whether exposure to novel dogs, rather than therapy dogs, also caused a reduction in stress levels. According to Carlson, Speca, Faris, and Patel (2007), blood pressure (systolic and diastolic) is positively correlated to stress. Vormbrock and Grossberg (1988) assessed heart rate and blood pressure as a measure of stress in college students. …

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