Psychological Study on College Students’ Simulated Pet Attachment: Social Anxiety and Emotional Needs Perspective

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_16How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Simulated Pets; Emotional Attachment; Social Anxiety; College Students

Abstract

With the deep integration of digital technology into daily life, simulated pets represented by “cloud cat watching” and “electronic pets” have become an emerging phenomenon of emotional companionship and consumption among college students. This study aims to explore the psychological mechanism of college students’ emotional attachment to simulated pets, especially its relationship with social anxiety, real-life pet-keeping experience and individual emotional needs. A questionnaire survey was conducted among 432 college students, and SPSS 27.0 was used for descriptive statistics, reliability and validity test, difference test and correlation analysis. The results show that: firstly, the usage rate of simulated pets among college students (8.6%) is still in the initial stage, but more than 70% of the group without continuous offline pet-keeping experience forms its potential user base; secondly, the overall social anxiety of college students is at a moderately low level, but the anxiety is prominent in unfamiliar and heterosexual social scenarios; thirdly, the perception of emotional value of simulated pets (such as relieving anxiety, loneliness and providing a sense of security) is significantly positively correlated with the level of individual social anxiety, indicating that simulated pets may act as an emotional compensation for real-life social discomfort; fourthly, there is no significant correlation between offline pet-keeping experience and simulated pet use behavior, and gender has no significant impact on their attachment level, revealing the uniqueness of simulated pets as a universal “low-stress companionship”. This study confirms the changes in young people’s emotional attachment patterns in the digital age, provides an empirical basis for understanding their emotional compensation behavior, and also provides a direction for the optimal design of relevant mental health products and digital companionship services.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Liying Yu
AU  - Peipei Li
AU  - Zhuangping Mo
AU  - Yangla Xing
AU  - Yuankai Shu
AU  - Jiuling Wu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/07
TI  - Psychological Study on College Students’ Simulated Pet Attachment: Social Anxiety and Emotional Needs Perspective
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 12th International Conference on Digital Humanities and Frontiers in Social Sciences (DHFSS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 135
EP  - 145
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_16
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_16
ID  - Yu2026
ER  -