Animal-Assisted Therapy for the Promotion of Social Competence: a Conceptual Framework
Animal-assisted interventions; Human-animal bond; Neurodevelopmental disorders; Social adaptation; Social maturity
Developmental disorders have a substantial effect on the social competence of children affecting their overall psychosocial functioning. Social competence entails the process of being socially mature by establishing stable and adaptive patterns of social behavior. Animal-assisted therapy, as an alternative treatment modality, has offered some new prospects for improving social cognition. This conceptual paper, thus, attempts to throw light on how animal-assisted therapy can help improve social competence. The paper draws its knowledge from the existing theories and empirical work done to propose a conceptual framework that can enhance social competence by incorporating therapy animals. It can be concluded that animal-assisted therapy has found to improve different dimensions crucial for development of social competence. This further suggests the dire need to explore the effectiveness of human-animal interactions by utilizing it for improving social competence. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
Human Arenas;Volume;8;Issue;1;Article No.;630465;pp.215-224
Springer Science and Business Media B.V.
Restricted Access; Hardcopy may be available in the library
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-022-00313-7 https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/86000377101?origin=resultslist
Narvekar H.N., Department of Psychology, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Karnataka, Bangalore, 560029, India; Ghani S., Department of Psychology, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Karnataka, Bangalore, 560029, India