Monday, August 17, 2026

Can dogs help teens cope with peer stress?

New study links certain teen–dog relationship qualities to healthier coping strategies among adolescents with social anxiety

Tufts University

About one in 10 teenagers experience social anxiety—persistent and disruptive worries about being judged by their classmates and other peers. In a new study of adolescents with social anxiety, researchers at Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University found that certain qualities of teens’ relationships with their pet dogs were associated with healthier ways of coping with peer-related stress.

The study, published in the Journal of Adolescence, analyzed survey responses from 514 U.S. adolescents ages 13 to 17 and a parent of each teenager surveyed. Researchers examined whether specific aspects of the teen–dog relationship—such as affection, companionship, caring for the dog, emotional support, friction, and viewing the dog as a substitute for people—were linked to different coping styles.

The findings suggest that the nuances of a teen’s unique relationship with their dog may affect how a pet dog contributes to healthy development, sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, the researchers expected that feeling emotional support from a dog would be linked more often to healthier coping strategies and less often to maladaptive ones. However, the results indicated the opposite: feelings of emotional support were less likely to be associated with positive thinking and more likely to be associated with persistently dwelling on negative thoughts.

The researchers undertook the study to assess how dogs may help teens cope with social stressors in a positive way during a life stage that can feel a bit like an emotional rollercoaster.

“During adolescence, teenagers develop their sense of self,” said Megan Mueller, Ph.D., the study’s senior author and an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Pathobiology at Cummings School. “Teenagers undergo a natural shift, with peers replacing parents as their primary relationships. There’s naturally some emotional churn during this transition, which can cause a lot of anxiety for some kids.”

“Dogs in many ways bridge the space between family and peers,” continued Mueller, who is also director of the Pets and Wellbeing (PAW) Lab at Cummings School. “They’re obviously not your parents, but they’re part of the family unit and may serve as a familiar source of comfort. We were curious if relationships with companion animals, and dogs in particular, may be one way of supporting effective coping through social support and emotion regulation.”

For the study, the researchers selected teen participants with high levels of social anxiety. Both teens and parents responded to questionnaires collecting data about the teen’s relationship with their dog and how the teen copes with stress from peers. The scientists used statistical models to identify links between specific aspects of the dog-human relationship and various coping behaviors reported by the teens and parents.

“We wanted to see if certain dog-relationship qualities were associated with either productive or less-effective coping strategies,” said Nicole Mason, the study’s lead author and a Ph.D. student at Cummings School.

The study found that companionship and caring for the dog both were linked to adolescents coping with peer stress in healthier ways, such as through problem solving, positive thinking, emotional regulation, and emotional expression.

Feeling affection toward a dog was not significantly associated with either healthier or less-healthy coping styles.

Friction—like getting frustrated over a dog’s shoe-chewing habit—was linked to less-healthy coping strategies for peer stress, such as avoidance, denial, rumination, and emotional numbing.

Viewing dogs as substitutes for people—for example, reporting that the pet dog is a more important friend than any peer—also was linked to less-healthy coping strategies. “One possible explanation is that a dog becoming a teen’s main source of social support may reflect a lack of other social connections,” said Mueller.

“Future studies will help us understand that relationship and other potential dynamics at play more clearly,” Mueller said. “We’re now following teens and their dogs over time to better understand how these relationships develop and whether factors such as a dog’s personality, behavior, and compatibility with a teen influence their coping and well-being."

Citation and disclaimer

Citation: Research reported in this article was supported by the National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development under award number R01HD109808. Complete information on authors, methodology, limitations, and conflicts of interest is available in the published paper.

Disclaimer: The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

DOI

10.1002/jad.70247

Method of Research

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

ARTICLEAdolescent‐Dog Relationship Quality and Coping With Peer Stress

Article Publication Date

17-Aug-2026

Video games built for prevention can reduce teen depression, study shows

In a clinical trial, a Dartmouth team's behavioral health-based game reduced symptoms on par with in-school programs

Dartmouth College

Screenshot — image:
A screenshot from PlaySmart, a video game for teenagers that Dartmouth researchers developed to raise awareness of mental health and substance abuse. A clinical trial of 532 high school students aged 16-19 showed that, a year later, teens who played the game reported a reduction in depressive symptoms that matched or doubled the documented effectiveness of general school-based programs, such as classroom lessons or small, organized group conversations with teachers focused on depression and mental health.

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Credit: Lynn Fiellin/Dartmouth

Few parents or teachers are likely to suggest that teenagers could benefit from playing more video games. But a new study suggests that a growing class of educational games may be a highly effective tool for treating and preventing depression in adolescents.

Dartmouth researchers recruited 532 high school students for one of the largest clinical trials of a video game designed to raise teens' awareness of mental health issues and substance abuse, according to a report in JAMA Network Open.

The team tracked 269 students who engaged with PlaySmart, a digital behavioral health game developed in the play2PREVENT Lab led by Lynn Fiellin, the study's senior author and a professor of biomedical data science and medicine in Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine.

These students played the game for about an hour after school once a week for up to six weeks. The other 263 students in the trial played commercial role-playing games with no therapeutic content. The researchers followed up with both groups for one year.

One year after the trial, teenagers in the PlaySmart group reported reductions in symptoms of depression that matched or doubled the documented effects of general school-based programs, the study finds. They also reported having a more positive attitude toward seeking psychological care after only six weeks of gameplay.

"One of the biggest challenges in adolescent mental health is that many young people never receive care because of barriers including stigma, limited access to providers, or just not recognizing they could benefit from help," says Caroline Barry, the study's first author.

"Because behavioral health games like PlaySmart are digital and self-guided, they have tremendous potential to reach adolescents across a wide range of settings who might not otherwise receive care, including communities where access to mental health services is very limited," says Barry, who is a postdoctoral research fellow in the play2PREVENT Lab and the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health (CTBH) at Dartmouth.

Better choices, better outcomes

In PlaySmart, players are the main character of a story in which they navigate scenarios based on experiences that the Fiellin Lab gathered from real teenagers and other stakeholders when they were first developing the game. Behavioral health experts in the lab documented instances of healthy and unhealthy decision-making and identified blind spots in teens' health knowledge.

The game presents students with a series of tasks and choices, such as identifying signs of depression in a friend's room or deciding to turn to a trusted adult for help with a difficult situation. Better choices lead to more positive outcomes for the player and other characters in the game, while bad choices lead to more negative outcomes.

Players also can work backward through the game to analyze their decision-making, learn recommended approaches to identifying and managing depression, and explore what might have happened had they made different choices.

"One of the biggest challenges in adolescent mental health is that many young people never receive care."

The PlaySmart trial was conducted from October 2021 to February 2024, with data analysis completed in November 2025. Students in the study were between the ages of 16 and 19 and recruited from school-based health programs across Connecticut, where Fiellin first established her lab when she was a faculty member at Yale University.

They were eligible to participate if they had reported vaping or consuming alcohol, cannabis, or nonopioid drugs within the past 30 days, or if they reported heightened symptoms of depression. Anyone with prior opioid misuse was excluded from the study.

"Serious games for prevention and mental health promotion are a rapidly growing area, but the evidence base is still emerging," Fiellin says. "Few clinical trials in this space combine a randomized design with commercial games as an active control and a 12-month follow-up. The rigorous design of our study alone sets a high bar for demonstrating impact."

About 53% of the 532 students were male, the researchers report. Around 45% were Black and 38% were Hispanic, with both groups having reported among the nation's highest rates of sadness and hopelessness.

Yet, exploratory analyses of the study data show no significant differences in PlaySmart's effect based on sex, race, grade level, food insecurity, or family history of substance use, Barry says. "The benefit held across all subgroups, which matters for an intervention meant to be delivered schoolwide or in communities broadly," she says.

Fiellin and Barry co-authored the study with Tyra Boomer, deputy director of the play2PREVENT Lab and a research project director in CTBH; Katie Haile, the Fiellin Lab's project manager and a research project director in CTBH; and Haiyi Xie, a Dartmouth professor of biomedical data science and community and family medicine who conducted statistical and data analysis.

'Fully self-guided by students'

PlaySmart originated as one of 10 projects nationwide selected by an initiative from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institutes of Health called HEAL, or Helping to End Addiction Longterm, to design and test new interventions for opioid misuse.

The study in JAMA Network Open is the second in a planned series of papers evaluating various effects of PlaySmart that are all based on the same clinical trial. A study led by Boomer and published in the January issue of Nature Health reports that students in the PlaySmart group retained a greater awareness of the harms of opioid abuse following the conclusion of gameplay.

The Dartmouth team's latest findings are significant when compared to what is normally achieved by universal preventative programs, such as those in a school, that target large populations before symptoms escalate. These can include classroom lessons or small, organized group conversations with teacher advisers where students focus on recognizing and addressing depression in themselves and in peers.

"These programs are delivered broadly, and adolescent mental health is influenced by many factors outside of any single intervention. That's why the prevention literature generally reports modest effect sizes," she says.

A pair of studies from 2017 and 2021 found that depression prevention programs result in small changes in how people score on the eight-point Patient Health Questionnaire, or PHQ-8, a self-reporting tool used in surveys and by clinicians to detect and monitor major depression. Scores range from 0 to 24, with the higher numbers indicating more severe symptoms.

Teenagers in the PlaySmart group had PHQ-8 depression scores that were 1.12 points lower one year later than the scores of students who did not play the game. This difference is typical of universal and targeted prevention programs and at the upper end of what has been reported in existing studies.

"PlaySmart sits right at the top of the range and was achieved with an in-school digital behavioral health game that's fully self-guided by the students and requires no onsite clinician," Fiellin says.

A comprehensive 2024 study of short-term school-based intervention programs also finds that marked reductions in PHQ-8 scores rarely last more than six months, with an average decrease of only 0.1 points a year later. "PlaySmart's effect at one year was more than double that benchmark and in a format schools can easily and consistently deliver," Fiellin says.

PlaySmart is one of five games developed by Fiellin's group that have been implemented in several school districts and other youth-facing organizations. The games are provided through her spin-off company, Playbl, which is independent from her lab at Dartmouth.

"Right now, PlaySmart is deployed to all students as a universal intervention geared toward prevention," Fiellin says. "However, our new findings suggest this game may have a critical role in increasing the access that young people identified as having more significant struggles with depressive symptoms have to an intervention."

Players also reported more positive attitudes toward seeking help after only six weeks of gameplay. Students playing the game navigate realistic interactive scenarios designed to encourage and normalize making healthy decisions, such as talking to a trusted adult even if their thoughts aren't fully organized.

Credit

Lynn Fiellin/Dartmouth

Journal

JAMA Network Open

DOI

10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.29173