When you talk to your pet like it’s just another person, you may have a moment of self-awareness and feel a little embarrassed. Your pet is a living creature, but it can’t understand you, and it certainly can’t respond. So why even bother?
According to research published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, talking to our pets, especially when we get super cutesy and raise our voice a few octaves, is normal, and it might help solve a scientific mystery.
University of Arizona researchers created a brand-new audio tool called “AURAL-Pet” to measure how humans chat with (or at, really) furry friends. According to study author Dr. Emily Bray, scientists have spent decades getting mixed results regarding the idea that living with animals lowers depression and loneliness. Some studies say pets are a balm for the soul, and others say they basically do nothing.
About 10% of What Pet Owners Say Is Apparently Directed at Their Animals
To sidestep the possibility of human bias, the researchers used an app called the Electronically Activated Recorder, or EAR. The Apple randomly recorded short bursts of ambient audio from 240 participants as they went about their lives without them knowing when the mic was on. The researchers found that roughly 10 percent of all human speech caught on tape was directed toward a cat or dog.
Go to pet owners sounded alike, with some carrying on normal conversational chit-chat while others dove straight into cutesy, high-pitched baby talk with sentences filled with adorable nicknames for their pets as they referred to themselves as the pet’s mom or dad.
Thus far, the research hasn’t made any grand pronouncements about how or why we speak to our pets, but the team is going to apply all this knowledge and the AURAL-Pet system to a new study that tracks the mental well-being of adults over 60.
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