Scientists just tracked 188 pet owners in the Netherlands for five days, and the surprising twist is that dogs and cats both lifted mood a little, but only one might be making stress worse

You come home after a rough day; maybe your boss was awful, your commute was terrible, or the world felt heavy. You pick up your cat, needing some comfort. It watches you, flicks its tail, and wanders off. Meanwhile, your friend’s dog greets them as if they just won the lottery. So, which pet is better for your mental health? A new Dutch study tried to find out, and the results are more complicated than you might think.

In a study published in Frontiers in Psychology, titled ‘Human-animal interaction: understanding the role of dog and cat interactions in emotional wellbeing’ by Sanne Peeters and colleagues, researchers followed 188 dog and cat owners over five days to see if interacting with their pets had real-time effects on their mood and stress levels. The method used was ecological momentary assessment (EMA); participants were pinged up to 10 times a day via a smartphone app, and asked quick questions about whether they were interacting with their pet, how they felt about their mood, and how stressed they felt.

Both pets gave people a short happiness boost, but stress is a different story
That may seem like a small thing, but according to the study in Frontiers in Psychology, interacting with either dogs or cats was linked to a short-term mood boost, with no difference by species. Both made their owners feel a bit better at the time. But when it came to stress, the picture was different.


Neither dogs nor cats were able to reduce their owners' stress levels. And while dogs were essentially neutral, cat interactions appeared to be associated with worse stress outcomes. According to the Frontiers in Psychology study, more intense interactions with cats during stressful moments were tentatively linked to stronger negative feelings rather than weaker ones. Dogs showed no such pattern, with interaction during stress having neither a positive nor a negative effect.

Why might cats make stress worse?
According to Frontiers in Psychology study, one possible explanation is that cat interactions are generally more passive, so a more intense interaction may feel emotionally evocative and heighten stress. If you need your cat to show up for you, and it doesn’t, the emotional friction might just make you feel worse than you already do.

There's also a deeper, evolutionary reason why cats are the way they are. According to a peer-reviewed chapter in ‘In the Light of Evolution: Volume III: Two Centuries of Darwin,’ titled ‘From Wild Animals to Domestic Pets: An Evolutionary View of Domestication,’ dogs were domesticated through thousands of years of intense artificial selection for guarding, hunting, and companionship. Cats took a very different route. Wildcats were never under the same pressures to be bred in a controlled way. They just drifted towards human settlements, and domestication happened slowly and passively. That evolutionary independence still colors the way cats behave today: they are still more solitary, more territorial, and far less wired to respond to human emotional cues than dogs are.

The study's limitations are worth knowing
The researchers acknowledge this study has real constraints. According to the Frontiers in Psychology study, single-item questions were used to measure mood and stress, so the quality of each pet interaction, whether a warm cuddle or a reluctant pat, was never captured. The study also had to exclude cases where a cat and a dog were both present at the same time, which is not the reality for many multi-pet households. Additionally, similar to humans, pets possess distinct personalities, and the owner-pet relationship is shaped by individual attachment styles, something that a five-day study cannot fully account for.

The bigger picture on pets and mental health
None of this should push anyone to rehome their cat. According to the Human Animal Bond Research Institute (HABRI), 87% of pet owners report experiencing mental health improvements from pet ownership, a figure drawn from HABRI's survey research, and more than one in five say a doctor or therapist has recommended a pet for their health.

According to a study, ‘Temporal patterns of owner-pet relationship, stress, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the effect of pet ownership on mental health: A longitudinal survey,’ published in PLOS ONE, that followed over 4,237 participants through several stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, dog owners showed consistently greater reductions in stress and loneliness over time compared to cat owners, a pattern that vaguely resembles the findings of the Dutch study.

So if your cat is lying on your chest after a bad Tuesday, you're probably fine. But if it flicks its tail and walks away when you need it most, well, science has something to say about that too.