Do Pets Raise Your EQ? A Look at the Evidence

If you’ve ever come home after a brutal day and felt your whole body relax the moment your dog greeted you at the door, you already know that pets do something to us emotionally. The tension in your shoulders loosens, your breathing slows, and whatever problem was racing through your mind suddenly feels a little less urgent.

Pet owners have long claimed that their animals make them better people. More patient. More attuned to nonverbal cues. More capable of managing stress. But is there actual science behind these claims? I decided to dig into the research. What I found was more complicated than I expected.

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

Before we can ask whether pets raise our EQ, we need to be clear about what EQ actually is. 

Emotional intelligence, or EQ, refers to the ability to recognize, understand, manage and effectively use emotions in ourselves and in our interactions with others. The concept was popularized in the 1990s by psychologist Daniel Goleman, though researchers Peter Salovey and John Mayer first introduced the term in 1990. Unlike IQ, which measures cognitive abilities, EQ captures the skills that help us navigate our emotional lives and connect meaningfully with the people around us.

Emotional intelligence is not just one thing, but a collection of related abilities. Truity’s model of EQ, supported by existing validated EQ models and data from over 157,000 survey participants, identifies five distinct factors:

• Self-awareness is the ability to recognize and identify your own emotional experiences. It’s knowing what you are feeling and why.
• Social awareness is the ability to perceive and understand the emotions of others. It involves reading nonverbal cues like body language and facial expressions.
• Emotional regulation is the ability to manage your own emotions. It means keeping a cool head and being able to direct your feelings in ways that serve your goals rather than derail them.
• Empathy is the ability to understand and relate to the emotional experiences of others. It’s not just noticing how someone feels, but actually caring about it.
• Emotional wellbeing describes your overall state of psychological and emotional prosperity. It includes having positive attitudes toward life and experiencing satisfaction in daily activities.

So when we ask whether pets can raise your EQ, what we are really asking is, can living with an animal improve any or all of these specific capacities?

The Promising Evidence

Let’s start with what science does support.

First, evidence says the biochemistry of bonding is real. When you pet a dog or cuddle with a cat, your body releases oxytocin, the same hormone involved in bonding between mothers and infants. A comprehensive review by researchers at the University of Rostock in Germany, found that interacting with animals led to measurable increases in oxytocin and decreases in cortisol, the stress hormone. Research from Virginia Commonwealth University suggests that even 5-20 minutes of interaction with a dog can produce these effects, and it works even if the dog is not yours.

This matters for emotional regulation and wellbeing. When cortisol drops and oxytocin rises, we feel calmer. We are less reactive. The mental noise quiets down. The research validates what pet owners intuitively know: animals can help us regulate our emotional states.

Pets may support emotional regulation in other ways too. A 2024 study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry explored how young adults with anxiety and depression experienced their relationships with pets. Participants described their animals as helping them “regulate negative emotions” and “stabilize mood swings.” Pets pulled them out of rumination and worry by demanding attention in the present moment. One participant explained that her cat helped her feel “steady and stabilized” during mood swings related to her mental health treatment.

There’s also evidence that pets can support empathy development in children. Vlasta Vizek Vidović and colleagues at the University of Zagreb in Croatia conducted a large study of 826 children and found that greater attachment to pet dogs was associated with higher empathy and more prosocial behavior. These results were replicated in a Canadian study, and a Japanese longitudinal study also found that pet ownership in toddlerhood predicted better emotional expression in later childhood.

Why Therapy Animals Work

Some of the strongest evidence for animals improving emotional skills comes from structured therapy settings.

Animal-assisted therapy programs have shown measurable benefits for both social awareness, the ability to read other people’s emotions, and for empathy. A study funded by the Human Animal Bond Research Institute (HABRI) in the United States found that children with autism spectrum disorders who participated in animal-assisted social skills training showed fewer social skill deficits and improved ability to read nonverbal cues compared to those in traditional programs. The theory is that animals, because they communicate primarily through body language, provide a kind of training ground for interpreting emotional signals.

Systematic reviews of animal-assisted interventions have found these programs to be effective in reducing psychological distress, including depression, anxiety and trauma symptoms. Multiple studies have concluded that these interventions improved behavior, communication and social skills across different populations. Dogs were particularly effective because of their natural attunement to human emotional states and their ability to provide immediate, nonjudgmental feedback.

A 2022 randomized controlled trial conducted by researchers at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom found that school children who participated in dog-assisted interventions showed reduced cortisol levels compared to control groups. The calming presence of the dogs appeared to lower stress enough that children could focus better and regulate their behavior more effectively.

These findings suggest that animals can serve as emotional co-regulators. They help calm our nervous systems in ways that create space for learning and growth. But there is an important caveat here: therapy animal programs are structured and intentional. The animals are trained, the interactions are guided, and there are specific goals in mind. This is different from simply having a pet at home.

But It's Not That Simple

With all this promising research, you might expect a straightforward conclusion that getting a pet will help boost your EQ. But the reality is more nuanced than that.

One question researchers continue to explore is the direction of the relationship. It’s possible that people who are already more empathetic and emotionally attuned are naturally drawn to animals in the first place. They may seek out pets, form stronger bonds with them, and report greater benefits from those relationships. A 2018 study from the University of Chicago found that when researchers accounted for factors like family background and socioeconomic status, some of the associations between pet ownership and empathy became less clear. This doesn’t mean pets have no effect, but it does confirm that the relationship between pet ownership and emotional development is intertwined with many other life factors.

What does seem to matter is the quality of the bond. A 2021 study by researchers at the Universities of Málaga in Spain and Porto in Portugal found something interesting. Their research suggests that emotional intelligence is positively associated with empathy for humans across the board, but is only associated with empathy for animals among people who already had pets. In other words, the experience of caring for an animal may be what activates or deepens the connection between our emotional skills and our capacity to relate to other creatures. 

The type of animal also plays a role. Several studies have found different patterns between dog owners and cat owners when it comes to empathy measures. Dogs tend to demand more active engagement – they need walks, training and direct interaction. Cats are often more independent. This does not make one pet better than another, but it may mean the emotional skills you practice differ depending on the animal you live with.

Perhaps the most important takeaway is that pet ownership is not a passive experience. The benefits emerge through engagement, attention and care, which means that having a pet in your home is an opportunity to develop EQ skills, not a guarantee of raising your EQ.

Should You Get a Pet?

I started this research expecting a simple answer. I did not get one. 

So where does this leave us?

If you already have a pet, the research clearly shows that the relationship can genuinely support your emotional wellbeing and help with emotional regulation. The stress reduction benefits of pet ownership are real, and the calming presence of an animal during difficult moments is in your hormones, not just your head. 

But I also learned that pets will not automatically make you more emotionally intelligent. What you bring to the relationship matters as much as what you get from it. Pets demand that you pay attention to something other than yourself. They need you to notice when they are hungry, anxious, playful or unwell. They need you to read cues that have nothing to do with words. 

If you engage mindfully with those needs and let the relationship be a two-way exchange, then you may be exercising emotional muscles that transfer to human relationships.

If you are considering getting a pet specifically to improve your emotional intelligence, I would encourage you to think about it differently. Rather than expecting the pet to change you, consider whether you are ready to invest in the kind of relationship where growth becomes possible. If you let them, pets can become a place where you practice the emotional skills that matter most: patience, attunement, presence and care. And those skills do not stay contained to that one relationship; they spill over into everything else.

Curious about your own emotional intelligence? Take Truity's free Emotional Intelligence (EQ) assessment to discover your strengths across all five factors of emotional intelligence.