Affective Regulation and Trait Anger Personalities: The Buffering Effect of the Companion Animal Bond

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Editor, thank you for asking me to review this interesting contribution. 

The manuscript “Affect Regulation and Trait Anger Personalities: The Buffering Effect of The Companion Animal Bond” is aimed at investigating, through a moderation model, the role that the companion animal bond has in buffering the relationship between the personality dimension of trait anger and affect dysregulation. 

The paper is based on the Affective Neuroscience framework and its foundation is thus very conceptually and theoretically sound.

Furthermore, the paper is well-written and articulated, and represents an innovative and relevant piece of literature on the human-animal relationship. 

Also, the results confirmed that the bond with a companion animal emerged as a protective factor that can aid individuals with trait anger in exhibiting lower levels of affect regulation problems.

In my opinion the acrticle could be accepted after only minor revisions, mostly typos to be corrected in order to reach a final form. 

In what follows, I highlight a few minor issues to revise:

• Lines 65-67: playfulness, seeking, and caring, as well as fear, anger, and sadness should go with (at least initial) capital letters: indeed, in the ANPS framework the core emotions are entirely written in small capital.

• In the Method section, the authors include participants owning a dog, a cat, or both. What is the rationale for this choice? I suggest that the authors explain it in further detail.

• Discussion section, line 227: the authors speak here of stress, but what about trauma? Can companion animals buffer the effects of trauma in individuals?

TYPOS:

• Line 76: please delete the semicolon before “[9]”.

• Line 109: please change “by which” into “through which”.

• Line 191: “Anger” goes with the first capital letter.

Finally, I suggest accepting the article after minor revisions. 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Dear Editor, I've only recognizes some minor typos to be corrected. As stated in the previous comments, the typos need to be corrected in order to reach a final form. 

Author Response

We sincerely thank the first Reviewer for the important positive words about our manuscript. Indeed, we are glad to hear that he/she found our manuscript conceptually sound, well-written and well-articulated, and that his/her judgment on our paper is that of an innovative and relevant piece of literature on the human-animal relationship. We thank the Reviewer for acknowledging our effort!

Comment 1: Lines 65-67: playfulness, seeking, and caring, as well as fear, anger, and sadness should go with (at least initial) capital letters: indeed, in the ANPS framework the core emotions are entirely written in small capital.

Response 1: Thank you for the precision in detecting this issue. Indeed, we changed the emotion-related words writing them with initial capital letters. 

Comment 2: In the Method section, the authors include participants owning a dog, a cat, or both. What is the rationale for this choice? I suggest that the authors explain it in further detail.

Response 2: We thank the Reviewer for allowing us to be more precise in the manuscript, writing specifically that “we decided to include as companion animals only cats and dogs because they represent the most frequently owned pets by individuals coming from various Western countries such as Italy, which is the context of the current study. Furthermore, cats and dogs are also the most investigated pets in the scientific research on the human-animal bond, as shown in the literature review previously outlined” (p. 4, lines 153-157). 

Comment 3: Discussion section, line 227: the authors speak here of stress, but what about trauma? Can companion animals buffer the effects of trauma in individuals?

Response 3: It is true that in the Discussion section we speak about stress, but not of trauma. Indeed, a promising clinical perspective regards the human-animal bond as a potential instrument of healing from traumatic experiences. Therefore, we added a few words on this topic, as follows: “Since stress and trauma are strictly interrelated, it is worth noting that a promising clinical perspective regards the human-animal bond as an effective relationship in the process of healing from trauma and the related hyper-reaction to stressful situations. More specifically, our findings can allow us to argue that the healing relationship with a pet can aid in emotion regulation capacities that foster the recovery process in traumatized individuals [59]”.  We finally modified the in-text citations accordingly (see p. 9, lines 350-355).

Typos:

Line 76: please delete the semicolon before “[9]”. DONE

Line 109: please change “by which” into “through which”. DONE

Line 191: “Anger” goes with the first capital letter. DONE

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Editor,

 

thank you for inviting me to review this interesting manuscript entitled “Affect Regulation and Trait Anger Personalities: The Buffering Effect of The Companion Animal Bond”. The manuscript illustrated a study investigating the role of the bond with pet in modulating the relationship between temperamental anger and emotion dysregulation. As a whole, I feel that the manuscript is highly innovative and brings a valuable contribution to the scientific field. However, I have also some majors concerns that I would like to be addressed by the authors before considering the manuscript for publication in your journal. I detail below each of these concerns.

The title is adequate and well communicates the contents of the manuscript.

The abstract is well written, but the last sentence may be too vague. Also, it would be important to report the direction of the moderation effect rather than the statistical significance of each conditional effect.

The literature covered in the Introduction is complete and the reader is well funnel towards the aims of the study. I found the hypotheses of the authors fascinating and I’m sure the reader would like to know more about why, according to the authors, the relationship with a pet might impact emotion regulation capacities. For instance, authors refer to the mother-infant emotion regulation system. They may want to better explain why the pet-human may be considered an emotion regulation system on its own (if they think it does).

The methods of the study are rigorous and adequate. I wonder why living in Italy for at least 10 years was a selection criteria. Did the authors collect additional demographic data? A table reporting these data may be useful.

The results section is well structured and quite complete. I only wonder if the interpretation of the moderation effect has been checked by the authors. Indeed, I may miss something, but it seems to me that the link between trait anger and affect dysregulation increases as the bond with the pet increases (so it might potentiate rather than reduce the relationship). 

Also, I found that the sentence stating that the effect varies across age levels is a little bit misleading as the authors did not test the moderating role of this variable. We only know that age is a significant covariate (so that it significantly predicted affect dysregulation) but we do not know if the moderation effect is in turn moderated by age level. An additional analysis would be needed for testing this aspect.

Regarding the discussion, I liked the way the authors discussed their results. I would only ask the authors to check the direction of the moderation effect. Also, the authors stated that the fact that they did not measure aggression is a limitation of the study whereas, in my opinion, it does not. Indeed, we have sufficient evidence indicating that emotion dysregulation is involved in a wide range of relevant behaviors so, as a first study on this topic, it might be sufficient to measure only affect dysregulation.

Author Response

Thank you for valuing our manuscript as highly innovative and representing “a valuable contribution to the scientific field”!

Comment 1:

The abstract is well written, but the last sentence may be too vague. Also, it would be important to report the direction of the moderation effect rather than the statistical significance of each conditional effect.

Response 1: 

Thank you for the precious comment.

We modified the last sentence of the abstract writing instead: “The psychological, health-related, and educational implications of the current anthrozoological study include the potential of the human-animal bond in acting as a facilitator of adaptive affect regulation processes, which can reduce the levels of uncontrolled anger-related emotions and the subsequent risk of out-of-control behaviors.”

Furthermore, the second to last sentence was also modified as follows: “The results showed that the effect of trait anger on affect dysregulation decreases especially when the degree of bond to an animal companion is low, suggesting that a strong bond to a companion animal may protect individuals with trait anger from the likelihood of experiencing affect regulation problems.”

Comment 2:

The literature covered in the Introduction is complete and the reader is well funnel towards the aims of the study. I found the hypotheses of the authors fascinating and I’m sure the reader would like to know more about why, according to the authors, the relationship with a pet might impact emotion regulation capacities. For instance, authors refer to the mother-infant emotion regulation system. They may want to better explain why the pet-human may be considered an emotion regulation system on its own (if they think it does).

Response 2: 

This point is particularly delicate as it addresses the value of the human-animal relationship as to its importance for fostering affect regulation in human beings. In the Discussion section, we deemed it significant to add the following sentences, thank to the Reviewer 2’s precious comment.

“Notably, a good-enough relationship with a significant other is well-known to foster adaptive affect regulation processes. In the psychological literature, the quality of the relationship has been also widely shown to represent the most effective predictor of good outcomes in terms of mental health and well-being. The significant other can be embodied by various figures, which range from the primary caregiver for the infant, to the peer group during adolescence, to the partner in adult life couples, as well as to the companion animal throughout the stages of the life cycle. Specifically, the literature on the human-animal bond has shown that companion animals can represent significant “others” for human beings, thus functioning as friends, siblings, and even children, provided that the relationship with the pet is adaptive and not characterized by exploitation or even cruelty. Ultimately, the ancient connection with companion animals can feature as an effective way to engage with significant others and to self-regulate as well” (p. 9, lines 356-367).

Comment 3:

The methods of the study are rigorous and adequate. I wonder why living in Italy for at least 10 years was a selection criteria. Did the authors collect additional demographic data? A table reporting these data may be useful.

Response 3:

We did collect only the socio-demographic data that are described in the Method section. Since they do not further contain other variables, we deemed it to not be necessary to include them in a Table. We hope the Reviewer agrees with us!

As regards the selection criteria, we thank the reviewer for pointing this out, which gives us opportunities to clarify the reasons for this inclusion criterion. It has been widely shown in the zoological-anthropological literature that local culture and national legislation have a significant impact on people's relationship with animals, especially pets (Pelé et al., 2021). In some countries, such as Italy, legislation has historically (Guazzaloca, 2020) gone so far as to grant pets a kind of civil right and severely punish mistreatment and neglect, so much so that the Italian parliament recently included the protection and care of animals in the constitution (Rescigno, 2023). The national cultural and legal framework thus provides a “perception” of the value and nature of the relationship with pets, which varies greatly from country to country and which can therefore significantly influence the relationship between the variables analyzed. For this reason, we considered that a 10-year residence in Italy is a sufficient parameter to better assess the awareness of the "dignity" and right to citizenship that pets have in our country, making the sample more homogeneous and not altering the characteristics of the variables analyzed, especially the CABS.

As a result, in the Limitations section (p. 10, lines 394-414) we inserted a paragraph explaining what we stated above.

References:

Guazzaloca, G. (2020). ‘Anyone who Abuses Animals is no Italian’: Animal Protection in Fascist Italy. European History Quarterly, 50(4), 669-688.

Pelé, M., Georges, J. Y., Matsuzawa, T., & Sueur, C. (2021). Perceptions of Human-Animal Relationships and Their Impacts on Animal Ethics, Law and Research. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 631238.

Rescigno, F. (2023). The entrance of animal beings in the Italian Constitution. The still incomplete path of animal subjectivity. Journal of Ethics and Legal Technologies, 5(JELT-Volume 5 Issue 1), 21-42.

Comment 4:

The results section is well structured and quite complete. I only wonder if the interpretation of the moderation effect has been checked by the authors. Indeed, I may miss something, but it seems to me that the link between trait anger and affect dysregulation increases as the bond with the pet increases (so it might potentiate rather than reduce the relationship).

Response 4:

Many thanks for this valuable comment. Thanks to the reviewer’s comment, we realized that we made a mistake by inverting high and low values of the human-animal bond both in the figure and when reporting the coefficients in the text. Therefore, we have changed both Figure 1 (“Interaction effect of trait anger by animal companion bond on affect dysregulation”) and the coefficients in the main text (see Results section). We confirm that the interpretation of the results is correct. The effect of the trait anger on affect dysregulation decreases when the levels of companion animal bond are higher.

Comment 5:

Also, I found that the sentence stating that the effect varies across age levels is a little bit misleading as the authors did not test the moderating role of this variable. We only know that age is a significant covariate (so that it significantly predicted affect dysregulation) but we do not know if the moderation effect is in turn moderated by age level. An additional analysis would be needed for testing this aspect.

Response 5:

Thank you for raising this point, which is actually interesting to address. Indeed, we performed analyses for moderated moderation including age as a moderator of the moderated effect. However, we did not find any significant effect. We also figured out that, when reporting the significance of the covariates, we made a mistake writing that the moderation model is especially true for younger people. We thus modified that part writing instead, “among the covariates, only age was found to be significant, with younger participants showing greater problems with affect dysregulation” (see p. 7, lines 274-276, of the Results section), and, “it is plausible that the bond with a pet might benefit younger people to a greater extent than older individuals in terms of the association between trait anger and affect dysregulation. However, future studies should investigate this hypothesis using more appropriate and targeted research designs and strive to recruit more age-balanced samples” (see p. 8, lines 322-324, of the Discussion section).

Nonetheless, not to burden the main text, we preferred not to report this analysis of moderated moderation. We hope the Reviewer agrees with us!

Comment 6:

Regarding the discussion, I liked the way the authors discussed their results. I would only ask the authors to check the direction of the moderation effect. Also, the authors stated that the fact that they did not measure aggression is a limitation of the study whereas, in my opinion, it does not. Indeed, we have sufficient evidence indicating that emotion dysregulation is involved in a wide range of relevant behaviors so, as a first study on this topic, it might be sufficient to measure only affect dysregulation.

Response 6:

We confirm that, even though there was a mistake in the Results section, the interpretation of the Results is correct (see also above). Also, we wrote that the fact that we did not measure aggression is a limitation of the study, whereas the reviewer thinks it is not. We appreciate very much his/her thoughts. Indeed, we added the following sentence to the Limitations section:
“However, it is worth noting that, to our knowledge, this is the first study on this topic, which adds value to our findings on the buffering effect of the human-animal bond on the relationship between trait anger and affect dysregulation” (p. 10, lines 389-393).