Horses can learn to identify joy and sadness against other basic emotions from human facial expressions.

This research shows that horses are capable of distinguishing and learning about human expressions of happiness and sadness, with interesting variations at an individual level and between the two emotions.

Objective and Methodology

• This study aimed to investigate whether horses are capable of identifying and learning human expressions of joy and sadness.
• The researchers developed a touchscreen-based system that displays pairs of human faces, each showing a different emotion.
• The system would reward the horse with a pellet when it touched a specific face – the one displaying the targeted emotion. For some horses, the target was a sad face, for others, a joyful face.
• The study involved replicating this task over time to evaluate whether horses could be trained to identify specific emotions.

Findings and Key Results

• Overall, horses proved able to learn to identify the emotions portrayed in the faces, as they performed better than what would be expected by random chance.
• Horses trained to identify sadness performed better than those trained to identify joy. This suggests that horses might process or relate to the expression of sadness more easily.
• However, there was noticeable variation among individual horse’s performance, suggesting differences in individual cognitive processing capabilities or attentiveness during the tasks.
• In a generalization test, where new human faces were introduced, horses trained to recognize joy performed above chance, showing they could apply their learning to new situations.
• Horses trained with the sad face did not generalize as well, indicating a possible limitation in the ability to apply learned emotion recognition across different contexts.

Implications of the Study

• The results provide new insights into horses’ cognitive processes involved in recognizing human emotional expressions.
• The abilities to identify and react to human emotions could be highly important for horses as domestic animals, contributing to effective interactions with humans.
• The individual differences and the differences in performance for joy and sadness indicate a complex psychological underpinning of emotion recognition in horses.