Rahel Marti

University of Basel | UNIBAS · Division of Clinical Psychology and Animal-Assisted Interventions

Background There is a broad range of known effects of animal contact on human mental and physical health. Neurological correlates of human interaction with animals have been sparsely investigated. We investigated changes in frontal brain activity in the presence of and during contact with a dog. Methods Twenty-one healthy individuals each particip...

Background: Previous research has called for improving psychological interventions and developing new treatments for prisoners. Animal-assisted prison-based programmes have increasingly been used as an approach, but there is a lack of studies investigating the effectiveness of such programmes. Objective: To investigate the effects of a dog-assis...

Objective To investigate if animal-assisted therapy (AAT) leads to higher consciousness in patients in a minimally conscious state during a therapy session, measured via behavioral reactions, heart rate and heart rate variability. Methods In a randomized two treatment multi-period crossover trial, 10 patients in a minimally conscious state partici...