Animal Stress In College Student Essay

Dogs have been used to help people with disabilities get around, calm anxiety attacks, and even predict when different medical attacks are about to occur. With dogs being so helpful, many universities have incorporated play time with animals into their campus activities and even their curriculum. Auburn University is one of the amazing campuses that allow students the time and the access to play with animals, particularly dogs (Recchio, 2015). These classes allow students to have an hour of what they call “puppy play”. They either take the students to a shelter where they can play with the animals or they bring the animals to the campus. Many studies have been done to show how the time spent with animals decreases the amount of stress or anxiety college students face in their college careers. (Burnett, 2012) It has been shown that playing with a puppy immediately lowers blood pressure and anxiety levels, making it a wonderful source of stress relief in college. The stereotype that most Black people are scared of animals brings up the question whether or not this “play time” works for all races. If anxiety is shown to decrease in …show more content…
In Crump and Terry L. Derting research they focus on the physiological and psychological aspects of stress, such as depression, loneliness, and blood pressure. They wanted to know if stress could harm you mentally or physically and if so whether or not animal could help prevent that. In their study they monitor different physiological responses the body has toward stress and spending time with animals. They show that being around animals physically helps the body and how it handles stress. They show this by watching the decrease of heart rate and high blood pressure when a student is around animals. They see that when a student is stressed, bringing an animal around will help the student calm faster and for stress levels to decrease. (Crump, & Terry,