The Puppy Blues Resemble the Baby Blues

Development and validation of the puppy blues scale measuring temporary affective disturbance resembling baby blues

Ståhl, A., Salonen, M., Hakanen, E. et al. Development and validation of the puppy blues scale measuring temporary affective disturbance resembling baby blues. npj Mental Health Res 3, 27 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44184-024-00072-z 

Summary By: Charlie Clarke

Introduction

As dog enthusiasts we go through the constant cycle of bringing home a perfect puppy, struggling through puppyhood and adolescence, and then basking in the golden years of wonderful companionship where we completely forget about how hard the puppy and adolescent phases were. Then we begin the cycle all over again with a new puppy. The “puppy blues” is a term that refers to the emotional strain, anxiety about responsibility, and challenges in adapting to the changes that puppyhood brings. New parents can go through a very similar phase adapting to the strain of parenthood. Mental health studies have shown that parents caring for children with psychiatric conditions have a very similar experience to pet owners dealing with unwanted behaviors. Additional studies have shown that people most severely affected by postpartum depression are those that score highly in traits of neuroticism. This paper looks to assess whether or not those same predispositions exist in the puppy blues. In addition, the paper is looking to create a way to measure and describe this interspecies relationship and assess the validity and reliability of the measurement. 

Methods

  The first step in developing this measurement tool was to gather the commonly felt negative feelings, length of negative feelings, and whether or not the owners did anything to help cope with the negative feelings. The most commonly reported responses from this pilot survey were exhaustion, feelings of inadequacy, anxiety about the puppy taking up time and attention, concerns about making mistakes, feelings of regret, difficulty forming an emotional bond, irritability with the puppy, disappointment with the puppy phase not meeting expectations, worry for the puppy’s wellbeing, and considering giving the puppy away.

After collecting the initial responses this survey was developed to measure the items brought up in the pilot survey. This survey was sent out to 2296 owners across 200 breeds. After responses were gathered the survey was sent back to the owners 1-4 months following their initial response to allow for a reliability retest. The responses from the test and retest were then used to pair down the questions to the essential 15 items used on the final survey. This survey was then sent out to 326 dog owners of 1-2 year old dogs, asking about their recollection of the puppy experience. The researchers sent these puppy owners 1 final survey asking them to rate how their dog is now. Independently, they also conducted research on the personality and wellbeing of the owners. They assessed neuroticism, pet attachment style, generalized anxiety, and depression. 

Figure 1. These plots are a graphical representation of how the puppy blues decrease with age across all 3 factors that contribute to puppy blues. 

Results

Of the dog owners surveyed, 45 percent reported experiencing significant negative feelings. 20 percent of those experiencing negative feelings reported that they resolved in less than a month, 31 percent resolved in 1 to 5 months, 29 percent reported 6 months to 1 year, and finally 19 percent reported that these feelings lasted longer than 1 year. This should offer comfort as a majority of people experiencing negative feelings found that they had resolved in under 6 months.

The outcome of the survey generation indicated that there are 3 main factors that contribute to the puppy blues: frustration, anxiety, and weariness. The factor that was most closely linked to subjective burden was weariness followed by anxiety and frustration. Additionally the owners who took both the puppy and adult surveys found that their current experiences with their dog tested significantly lower than their puppy survey. The box and whisker plot shown above shows the middle 50% of responses inside the box and the lines extending above and below indicate the top 25% of scores and bottom 25% of scores. Plot A shows the measurements of anxiety in the puppy phase(left) vs the current 1-2 year old dog(right). Plot B shows the measurement of frustration in the puppy phase(left) vs the current 1-2 year old dog(right). Plot C shows the measurement of weariness in the puppy phase(left) vs the current 1-2 year old dog(right). The difference in subjective burden was 90 percent.

Discussion

The first takeaway of this study is that this set of 15 questions has been sufficiently validated and is reliable. Since there is no gold standard for measuring the puppy blues, the authors compared this study to postpartum depression statistics. The rates of puppy blues at 45 percent of pet owners is remarkably similar to the 38 percent of women experiencing mild to severe postpartum depression. Additionally the percentage of severely affected pet owners is 10 percent which is exactly the same rate as severely affected parents with postpartum depression.

The next main takeaway is that new pet owners are typically experiencing these 3 factors: anxiety, frustration, and weariness. The anxiety component is measuring how inadequate the owner feels and concern for the puppy’s wellbeing. The frustration component is measuring the overall sense of dissatisfaction and emotional strain. Finally, the weariness component captures the strain associated with puppy caregiving. The owner’s testing results demonstrated that people with attachment anxiety, attachment avoidance, and subjective strain were very positively correlated to general anxiety. 

* The questionnaire is available in the supplement on pages 9-11.