If You Talk To Your Pet Like They're A Person, Science Says It Matters More Than You Anticipate It Would

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By Emily Chan Sep 10, 2026

Researchers at the University of Arizona believe that the way owners speak to their pets can affect well-being. The research team developed the first reliable tool to analyze how people talk to their pets.

The system, known as AURAL-Pet, will help them better understand interactions between humans and pets, as well as the impact these interactions have on human well-being.

The team tested AURAL-Pet on 5,072 recordings of people's conversations with or about their pets. A total of 240 people participated in the study. About two-thirds of the group were women, and the ages ranged from 24 to 87.

AURAL-Pet is a coding system consisting of different categories of human-animal interactions, including praise, commands, questions, and frustration. The researchers would mark the categories as either absent or present in each audio clip.

They captured interactions with the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), a smartphone app that randomly turns on for short bursts.

Participants know they're being recorded through the app, but they don't know exactly when it's recording, so they tend to forget about it.

On average, people spoke to their pets in about 9.2% of all the moments they were caught talking to anyone or anything. It just goes to show that interactions with pets play a small but important role in the day-to-day.

People were alone in 44% of pet-related clips, with one other person in 36% of clips and with multiple people in about 14%.

In the recordings, certain patterns were detected across the board, yet no two pet owners sounded exactly alike. Pet owners often narrated their own thoughts or actions, discussed common topics like the weather and future plans, or described their pet's behavior.

Young female blonde hair summer style concept with dog Sergii - stock.adobe.com - illustrative purposes only, not the actual person or dog - pictured above is a smiling woman hugging her dog

There were also variations in how people interacted with their pets. Some individuals only referred to their pet by a nickname and used baby talk, while others never used a nickname at all.

Such differences may explain why pet ownership affects people's well-being so differently.

Using a consistently affectionate style of speech with pets versus sticking to practical talk about food, walks, or basic commands is most likely what skews the results of studies on pet and human well-being. The newly developed tool can measure these different patterns while resisting bias.

"We hope AURAL-Pet can be used in future studies to understand how differences in these interaction styles map onto mental health and well-being outcomes in humans," said Dara Jonkoski, the lead author of the study and a PhD student in the Department of Psychology.

AURAL-Pet is now being applied to another project called the C.A.R.E. study, which involves gathering data about mental health and well-being from adults over the age of 60. The coding system may help researchers learn how interactions with pets affect the well-being of older individuals.

The findings of the study were published in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.

By Emily Chan Sep 10, 2026

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