Men with a more anxious disposition may be almost twice as likely as women to be nipped and bitten by dogs, claimed a study.
The study associated a link between the personality traits and the risk of being bitten and found that anxious people have a three-fold increased risk of being bitten by dogs.
The more emotionally stable and less neurotic an individual was, the lower was their risk of being bitten by a dog.
"It is essential that previously assumed risk factors are reassessed as this study has revealed that prior beliefs such as bites typically being from familiar dogs are contested," said Carri Westgarth, a researcher at the University of Liverpool in the UK.
In the study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the team examined 694 people in 385 households and assessed their emotional stability.
The results showed that the people who owned several dogs were more than three times as likely to have been bitten than those who did not own dogs.
More than half of respondents reported that they had been bitten by a dog they did not know and one in four respondents said they had been bitten before.
One in three (33 percent) dog bites required treatment, but only a small proportion (0.6 percent) required hospital treatment.
While this is reassuring, even minor bites can cause significant emotional distress, the researchers stated.
"Dog bite prevention schemes may also need to target particular behaviours around dogs by different victim personality types," the researchers said.
(with IANS inputs)
