Provide a clear and indicative title for your proposed research: it is essential that your title is concise and contains some key words that indicate

A growing body of research suggests that pets have beneficial effects on children's socioemotional health, including quality of life and self-esteem (Purewal et al., 2017). However, in relation to anxiety/depression symptomatology, literature is surprisingly sparse and reveals conflicting findings.



Importantly, the relationship with a pet appears more influential than ownership alone for psychological health. Most adolescents self-report strong attachments to pets (Hawkins et al., 2017); indeed, when understood within attachment theory, there can be features of secure attachment in child-pet relationships that have similarities to human-human attachments (Carr & Rockett, 2017). Pets may also directly confer benefits through provision of companionship or emotional reciprocity (Muldoon et al., 2019) or via physiological mechanisms (Beetz et al., 2012); indirectly, pets might act as 'social lubricants' (Wood et al., 2015). Despite this, the impact of pet attachment on mental health has hardly been explored in the literature. In particular, there is no published literature using qualitative methodology to explore adolescents' experiences in this area. Further research is required to understand how multispecies attachment relationships within the family system together influence adolescents' mental health.



This unique project will therefore address this gap, targeting early adolescence (11-14 years). The project aims to investigate the role that pets play in adolescents' experiences of anxiety/depression, using quantitative and qualitative methods. The following research questions will be addressed:

What associations are there between pet ownership, pet attachment and self-reported anxiety/depression symptomatology in early adolescence, and what underlying mechanisms explain these associations?

What are early adolescents' lived experiences of the role that pets play in day-to-day lives with anxiety/depression symptomatology?



The design will...