Abstract:

As humans’ loyal friends, pets have a widely acknowledged positive effect on humans’ physical and mental health. The researches on pet personality have revealed that pets, rather than merely a kind of animal, were human-like companions who could interact with their owner like human friends. Pets are one part of the owners’ social support system, but they are neither compensation or competitor against human relationship. They function independently. The behavior evidence implied that the bond between pets and their owners is similar with the parental relationship, where pets elicited the parental behavior and the owners also benefit from caring the pets. This review revealed the limitation of former researches in sample selection and the lack of experimental evidence. Further researches should have more concern on the integrity of research samples, develop the behavioral experiment paradigm and introduce the neural cognition method to examine the inner mechanism by which pets affect the owners.

Key words: pet, physical and mental health, pet personality, social support