Beyond the campus context: Reducing stress among students and community members through virtual canine comfort modules
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Research continues to demonstrate the stress-reducing benefits of in-person interactions with therapy dogs, especially among students engaged within educational contexts. However, less is known about the potential of virtual interactions with therapy dogs to reduce stress among post-secondary students and if such benefits might extend to members of the general community. Accordingly, the aim of this study was twofold. First, we explored how a virtual canine-assisted stress-reduction intervention might support well-being among post-secondary students and, second, we extended the model to explore if the intervention might support well-being among non-student community members. Using a two-phased method, we assessed the effects of a 5-min asynchronous virtual canine-assisted intervention (CAI) on self-reports of stress in both students (Phase I; N = 963) and community members (Phase II; N = 122). Results revealed that spending as little as 5 min viewing virtual canine comfort modules significantly reduced participants’ pre-to-post-test self-perceived stress among both post-secondary students and non-student community members. Further, among post-secondary students, women experienced greater reductions in stress compared to male participants. Before the CAI, women had higher stress levels compared to men, but after the CAI, women and men had similar stress levels. The results did not reveal age to be significantly related to the magnitude of student participants’ self-reported stress reduction. Our results have implications both for the field of human-animal interactions and for the delivery of mental health interventions that are low-cost, low-barrier, and easily accessible to diverse individuals.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it