Trying to find the Gullone Clarke 2015 Study
I searched for this a while back and ended up going down a pretty deep rabbit hole. What I found is that there isn't a single well-known, widely cited academic paper by researchers named Gullone and Clarke from 2015 specifically about pets that shows up in major databases. There's an Erica Gullone who has done extensive research on anxiety, fear, and phobias in children and adolescents, sometimes touching on animals as stimuli in those contexts, but the framing of "Gullone Clarke 2015 Study Pets" doesn't map cleanly onto one specific publication. From what I've seen, people searching for this tend to be mixing together a few different threads. The Gullone name in psychology literature is most associated with work on emotional regulation, anxiety responses, and sometimes animal-assisted interventions. Clarke is a common enough surname in psychology that it shows up in plenty of collaborative papers. But pinning down a single 2015 study that matches all three labels is tricky because the exact citation doesn't appear to exist as a standalone reference. One realistic scenario: you may have encountered a reference in a syllabus, a blog post, or a secondary source that cited it informally without giving the full details. That happens a lot. I ran into this exact problem when a student once asked me about a "Clarke and Gullone 2015" paper on pet ownership and child development. The paper they were looking for didn't exist under that author order or that year. What actually existed was older work by Gullone on fear responses in children, and separate work by other researchers on pets and development. The citation got mashed together somewhere along the way.
If you're trying to track down actual research on pets and their effects, here's what I'd suggest instead of chasing that specific label. Look up Gullone's actual publication record around the mid-2010s. She was active in publishing on emotional and behavioral outcomes, and some of her work does intersect with animals either as therapeutic subjects or as variables in family environments. Cross-reference that with Clarke collaborators if you believe co-authorship is real. Use Google Scholar's "cited by" feature to see if any paper with similar themes keeps getting referenced under a slightly different title or author order. Another angle: check whether the study you're looking for might actually be from a different year. Citation errors across years are extremely common. A paper from 2013 or 2017 could easily get misremembered as 2015, especially if it was discussed in a conference presentation or a course reading list where dates weren't carefully recorded.
Also worth considering: if this came from a non-academic source like a website or social media post, the reference may have been invented or conflated. I've seen this happen more often than I'd like to admit. Someone writes a compelling summary, cites a study that sounds plausible, and then half a dozen other sites copy the citation without verifying it. By the time you dig into the primary literature, the original paper simply isn't there. What I usually do in these situations is take the core question the study was supposedly answering — pet ownership effects, childhood development, anxiety, whatever the theme was — and search for the actual literature on that topic directly. You'll almost certainly find better, verifiable sources than the one you're chasing. The pet and human wellbeing space has a solid body of real research, even if the specific citation you have in mind doesn't hold up to scrutiny. If you can share where you first saw the reference — a class, a website, a book — I might be able to help trace it to whatever it's actually pointing at.
Get the Full Details
