Tracking positive and negative affect in PTSD inpatients during a service dog intervention.

Abstract

Though popular across many audiences, engagement with a service dog has undergone limited empirical evaluation as a complementary or alternative treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The present study took advantage of a service dog training intervention underway in a Department of Veterans Affairs residential PTSD treatment program to perform a within-subjects comparison of a range of phenotypic markers. The present report considers negative and positive affect, assessed throughout the day, contrasting weeks when participants were or were not accompanied by their service dog. Fifty-four veterans were studied for 2-6 weeks. Negative and positive affect were sampled five times per day using items from the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. Participants also wore a single-patch ECG/activity recorder and slept on beds recording sleep actigraphically. Linear mixed effects regression was employed to estimate the effect of the presence of service dog on momentary affect in the context of other presumable influences. Missing data were managed using methods applicable to random and nonrandom missingness. In this sample, the presence of a service dog was associated with reduced negative and increased positive affect, with both effects diminishing over time. Only negative affect was associated with time in residential treatment, and only positive affect was associated with concurrent heart rate, activity, and the interaction of activity and prior-night actigraphic sleep efficiency. These results concur with prior reports of reduced PTSD symptomology in association with the presence of a service dog, and with the distinct neurocircuitries underlying defensive and appetitive emotion and motivation. Limitations derive from the artificial environment and brief duration of study.What is the public health significance of this article? Veterans undergoing inpatient treatment for PTSD reported reduced negative affect and increased positive affect when in the company of a familiar service-dog-in-training. These effects were consistent with modest augmentation of treatment, at least in the short term.

Assistance dogs for military veterans with PTSD: A systematic review, meta-analysis, and meta-synthesis

“…Seven articles were excluded from specific aims analyses, as the participants in these studies were not themselves veterans [33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. Excluded articles, summarized in Table 1.…”

Tutorial: Assessing the impact of nonignorable missingness on regression analysis using Index of Local Sensitivity to Nonignorability.

“…A limitation of the isni package is that it evaluates sensitivity to nonignorability only for missing values in the outcome variable. Thus, if there are units with missing predictors, one should either delete those units or impute their missing predictors before running an ISNI analysis (Woodward et al, 2021). ISNI methods for the case of missing data in both outcomes and covariates now exist (H. Chen & Heitjan, 2022;Gao et al, 2016;Yuan et al, 2020).…”

Bedtime regularity predicts positive affect among veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder: an ecological momentary assessment study

“…The present study represents a secondary analysis of Woodward et al [36]. The parent study compared affective experiences within subjects across weeks when participants were or were not accompanied by their service dog in a sample of veterans with PTSD in a residential treatment program.…”