Pets Can Help Autistic Children Learn to Share and Comfort Others

I've heard so much lately about animal therapy for autistic children. I think this is a really important revelation in how autistic children may benefit, as well as animals, by having animal welfare organizations design programs centered around this idea.

Some autistic people report feeling more strongly connected to animals than to other people, but a new study suggests that introducing companion animals to autistic children at the right time in life may help with human bonding, too.

French researchers studied 40 children with autism and their families, examining whether the family had a pet and, if so, when the animal was acquired, and whether the presence or absence of a pet had any influence on the autistic child’s ability to bond. Most households with pets had either dogs or cats, but one family kept a rabbit, and another a hamster.

It appeared that having a pet at all didn’t matter as much as when the pet was introduced to the home. Autistic children who grew up with a pet from birth appeared to be no different from those living in households without pets, but children who received a pet at age 4 or 5 showed major improvement in two social skills that are not only difficult for autistic people, but are also critical in sustaining human relationships: sharing with others and comforting people in distress.

Autistic children who received a pet when they were around kindergarten age showed gains in both behaviors, though there was no improvement in other areas, and the changes were still measurable several years later: the average age of the children in the study was 10.

The ability to share and to give comfort to those in need rely on the separate ability to recognize the desires and emotions of others and to empathize with them. A fundamental problem that characterizes autism is difficulty in understanding other people’s thoughts, feelings and intentions — known as “mind reading” or “theory of mind” — so improvement in these prosocial behaviors means that children are improving on one of the key aspects of the condition. Moreover, these changes were not correlated with IQ scores, meaning that all autistic children, regardless of the severity of their symptoms, could potentially show the same benefits.

It is not clear why introducing a pet into the family later was more effective than always having one around. The authors suggest that children may simply perceive pre-existing pets as part of the background, or that the pets may already be more strongly bonded with other family members by the time the child enters the household. Another possibility, the authors write, is that the “arrival of a pet strengthens the cohesion of the family and increases the levels of interaction between their members.”

Seeing other people respond to the pet — and having interactions with a creature that isn’t as socially complicated as a human — could give autistic children new insight into previously mystifying exchanges of social information.

The study was not a controlled trial, so it doesn’t eliminate the possibility that families who introduce pets to their children at age 4 or 5 are somehow different from those who don’t in ways that were not measured by the study. However, the specificity of the behavioral changes suggest otherwise. Because the study was also small, it was unable to explore questions like whether one type of pet may be more helpful than another.

The research adds to the growing evidence suggesting that pets can improve both mental and physical health for all people; previous data suggest that animal companions reduce stress, improve mood and may even prevent the development of some allergies if introduced in childhood. However, simply having a pet around isn’t enough to reap psychological benefits: you must love and connect with the animal, or else, not surprisingly, it won’t relieve your stress or lift your mood.

Couples Therapy Can Help PTSD and Improve Relationships

The distress of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) hurts not only the victims of trauma, but their loved ones as well, particularly their spouses or partners. Now a study suggests that a new type of couples therapy may help.


PTSD has been particularly devastating for veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars — suicide, which is commonly linked with the disorder, is now killing more U.S. soldiers than combat itself. But even for those who don’t take their own lives, the combination of PTSD and traumatic brain injury (TBI), caused by repeated concussions during battle — both signature wounds of today’s wars — is profoundly disabling, as columnist Nick Kristof described in a harrowing article in the New York Times last Sunday. Because these brain wounds are not visible, unlike a lost limb, they often go unacknowledged by the sufferer, undiagnosed and untreated.

“If you want to understand how America is failing its soldiers and veterans, honoring them with lip service and ceremonies but breaking faith with them on all that matters most,” Kristof wrote, you should consider the story of Maj. Ben Richards, a rising star in the U.S. Army, who was eventually diagnosed with both TBI and PTSD and nearly lost his marriage to his wife, Farrah:

A once boisterous dad who loved to roughhouse with his children — now there are four, ages 1 to 14 — Ben no longer seemed to know how to play with them. He often suffered incapacitating headaches, overwhelming fatigue and constant insomnia. Especially when dozing, he was on a hair trigger. If Farrah rose at night, she sometimes didn’t return to bed for fear that her husband might think she was an enemy and attack her. Instead, she’d spend the rest of the night on the couch.

For a woman who had been functioning as a single mom and was now eager to resume her former married life, all this was devastating. And it got worse. Farrah would tell her husband things, and then he would repeatedly forget — and reproach her for not telling him. He was distracted, withdrawn and unhelpful, and he repeatedly let her down.
“Our marriage was at real risk at this point,” Richards says. “We got to a point where we thought about separating.”

The hair-trigger nerves, irritability, inability to concentrate, insomnia and emotional withdrawal are all classic symptoms of PTSD, particularly when it is combined with brain injury. The Richards family is still struggling to get appropriate treatment.

Currently, counseling for PTSD focuses only on the individual with the disorder — and it does help. But while it improves patients’ psychological and social functioning, those improvements typically don’t occur in the context of their relationships with spouses or partners. What’s more, even when patients receive high-quality treatment for PTSD, research shows they are less likely to get better if their marital problems go unaddressed.

Although previous studies have suggested that couples counseling can help such patients improve both their PTSD symptoms and their relationship satisfaction, those studies have usually been small and lacking a control group. So, the new research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, sought to test the theory more rigorously. The trial involved 40 heterosexual and same-sex couples, half of whom were treated in an outpatient VA hospital clinic in Boston, and the other half who were treated at a university research center in Toronto, Canada.

The couples were randomly assigned either to receive a treatment called “cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy” or to put their names on a waiting list for treatment. The therapy itself began by teaching both members of the couple about the symptoms of PTSD, how the disorder affects their relationship and vice versa, and helping couples to feel safe talking about the disorder with each other. The first phase of treatment emphasized positive communication to break the cycle of negativity that often accompanies PTSD, which tends to lead both partners to become increasingly critical of each other. The authors noted that at the end of the first session, “the couple is instructed to catch each other doing nice things to promote positivity in their relationship and decrease selective attention to negativity.”

Over 15 sessions, the couples learned more about the impact of the particular trauma on their relationship and on the affected partner, including how PTSD can change the brain’s responses in ways that increase impulsivity, social withdrawal and aggression. The pairs were also instructed to try not to avoid circumstances — people, places, situations or feelings — that might trigger PTSD symptoms because that only reinforces the sufferer’s fear. Instead, they learned to push through the fear while making each other feel safe, such as by attending previously avoided social events together and learning that they can be pleasurable and fun, once their fear was overcome.

Compared with the couples who were waitlisted, the partner with PTSD in couples who underwent therapy showed a three times larger decrease in severity of PTSD symptoms. And the couples also reported four times more relationship satisfaction after therapy, compared with the control group. Indeed, after treatment, 81% of those in the treatment group no longer met the criteria for PTSD, compared with 63% of those on the waiting list. Three months later, the treatment group continued to do better than the controls.

The authors concluded that the treatment “produced improvements in clinician-rated PTSD symptoms…as well as patient-rated relationship satisfaction.” But because it’s still possible that the positive results were due simply to the fact that people in treatment got more therapeutic attention than those on the waiting list, couples therapy must be compared to another type of treatment to see exactly how effective it really is.

Still, the study’s findings fall in line with a wide range of research showing that social support from close relationships improves mental and physical health. They also suggest that a non-drug approach could improve PTSD, which is often difficult to treat.

“There is increasing recognition that intimate relationships play a potent role in recovery from PTSD,” the study authors write, and if their research is replicated, specialized couples therapy could be made available to veterans and others who struggle, along with their partners, with this often-invisible but devastating disorder.