Animal-Assisted Psychotherapy: A Meta-Analytic Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In this meta-analysis, we examine the efficacy of animal-assisted psychotherapy ( AAP ) on mental disorders. Twenty-eight studies quantitatively assessed the treatment effects of AAP . We used a random effects model to aggregate each study into an overall effect size. We found a large effect for pre- versus post-intervention comparisons and a moderate effect for the treatment versus control comparison for all disorders. Most of the moderator analyses were non-significant. We used the Grade measure (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation) to assess the quality of the studies included in this paper. The results of the Grade analyses indicated a score of very low quality on the assessment. Therefore, only tentative conclusions about the efficacy of AAP can be drawn. The results suggest that AAP is a potentially efficacious treatment for mental disorders; however, significant limitations temper this conclusion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".