In November of 2005 I covered a report from the British Medical Journal about a study of so-called “dolphin therapy.” In brief, the researchers solicited people with depression to travel to a tropical area where they were promised the opportunity to swim with dolphins. As people arrived, some were diverted into a control group that simply went swimming and others actually got to swim with dolphins. When asked to complete a self-report inventory about depression after a couple of weeks, those who swam with dolphins gave answers showing lower levels of depression than those who did not swim with dolphins. I previously enumerated problems with this study.
Welp, I learned that Eric Nagourney of the New York Times has covered the same study, though less critically, in an article entitled “Therapies: A Dose of Dolphins for Moderate Depression.” Mr. Nagourney noted another concern about the therapy: “Some conservationists, however, frown on swim-with-dolphin programs, contending they are stressful to the animals.”
John Grohol’s Pysch Central blog reprinted part of Mr. Nagourney’s article. Psych Central offered no further analysis of the study.
Intrigued by the spread of the story, I used “dolphin therapy depression ‘British Medical Journal’” as a search term in Google and Yahoo. Whew! It appears this study has legs! There were 1000s of hits (~2400 in Yahoo; ~12000 in Google). To be sure, not all of the hits will link to uncritical reports of the study, but there’s enough buzz clearly hooked to the study that its results will probably become accepted as fact. Sigh.
This seems to me to be another instance of the appeal of a novel therapy causing people to accept results from a study that we might otherwise question strongly. Perhaps I’m being hypercritical…. I sure would like to see the invitation that went to the people who participated in the therapy; it would tell a lot. How were the people recruited? I do not recall that the study documented this clearly. Oh well. The study will be a good example to use in research classes.
Have you ever touched a dolphin? I have and I am not depressed. So there! It must work.
Link to Mr. Nagourney’s article and a link to Psych Central’s entry.
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Two years ago, I took some of my students to Discovery Cove in Florida where we all swam with the dolphins. There were some special needs people there too but not with our group; they seemed to enjoy swimming with the dolphins and honestly the dolphins did not seem to mind. The trainers said that if the dolphins are tried with the playing with the humans, they just swim away. I did observe this with one of the dolphins with our group. The trainers made it clear to me that they never force a dolphin to work with a human.
I think the reason that it may appear to work with some people may because it is increasing the “affect” that Dr. Stanley Greenspan, Floortime guru, talks about all the time in his work with autistic children. I know that Greenspan does not use dolphins but I think the effect is the same. When the depressed adults are in the water with the dolphins, their positive affect is aroused and anti-depression hormones are release perhaps which makes them feel better. I know this is not scientific but I compare all this dolphin therapy to the same campaign of “seniors need pets”. Companionship is fostered with an animal that is there to listen with the senior; the adult has someone to talk to and therefore, feelings of lonliness are minimize.
True, it could be that swimming with dolphins works with some folks better than others. In fact, I’d bet that that this is true of just about any therapy, that is, that “X works better with some folks than with others.” That’s the essence of a distribution: Some folks have higher scores than others on just about anything one measures. Even the most effective therapies work better with some folks than with other folks.
“[T]heir positive affect is aroused and anti-depression hormones are release perhaps which makes them feel better.” To me, this is a very intriguing hypothesis. In The Principles of Psychology (1981; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; pp. 1065-1066) William James proposed something similar.
I know that we usually orient our views of behavior and feelings the other way around: We behave certain ways because of how we feel. It makes sense to me that we probably feel the way we do because of how we behave. I have a suspicion that James is partially right, that affect follows behavior. Furthermore, I would very much like to have contemporary science assess whether inducing certain behaviors causes changes in bio-chemical features of the body (your “hormones”). (For an interesting parallel, see the developments in the neuropsych of reading: Teaching individuals with dyslexia how to read results in objectively observable changes in the activation of parts of their brains.)
However, the bigger issue is not whether behavior causes feelings or feelings cause behavior. I think it is coming to understand scientifically what causes both of them. If they are highly correlated, it seems likely they both may be caused by some third thing. Likely that’s a set of environmental conditions and a history of the consequences associated with those conditions. This is essentially a rehash of a point made by B. F. Skinner in Beyond Behaviorism (1974; New York, Knopf).
Thanks for commenting!
JohnL