Horses Categorize Human Emotions Cross-Modally Based on Facial Expression and Non-Verbal Vocalizations.
- Journal Article
Summary
The research is focused on understanding whether horses can cross-modally categorize the emotions of humans based on facial expressions and non-verbal vocalizations.
Research Objective
The main objective of the study was to probe into the ability of horses to cross-modally recognize human emotions. In other words, the researchers sought to determine if horses can connect visual signals (human facial expressions) and auditory signals (human non-verbal vocalizations) to categorize emotions.
Study Methodology
- Two distinct animated images representing anger and joy were presented to the horses simultaneously.
- A speaker was used to present emotional human non-verbal vocalizations that matched one of the two facial expressions being displayed.
- The researchers then analysed how the horses responded to the conflicting visual and auditory signals.
Key Findings
- The researchers observed that horses paid more attention to the image that contradicted the vocalization. This was interpreted as the horses’ intrigue towards the inconsistent combination of the visual and auditory stimuli.
- Additionally, it was established that the horses responded in a manner consistent with the emotional tone carried in the vocalization. This behavioral response was observed alongside physiological changes such as varying heart rates.
Implications of the Research
The results from this study provide compelling evidence that horses are indeed capable of cross-modal recognition of human emotions. This implies that horses not only perceive human facial expressions and non-verbal vocalizations but can also link them to identify the emotional state of a human. Besides contributing to our understanding of animal emotions, the study also highlights horses’ ability to emotionally engage with humans. Such discoveries can help improve horse-human interactions, particularly in therapy and equestrianism. The research may also pave the way for further studies on emotional cognition in different animal species.
Cite This Article
Publication
Researcher Affiliations
- INRA, PRC, CNRS, IFCE, Université de Tours, 37380 Nouzilly, France. milena.trosch@gmail.com.
- INRA, PRC, CNRS, IFCE, Université de Tours, 37380 Nouzilly, France. florent.cuzol@gmail.com.
- INRA, PRC, CNRS, IFCE, Université de Tours, 37380 Nouzilly, France. celine.parias@inra.fr.
- INRA, PRC, CNRS, IFCE, Université de Tours, 37380 Nouzilly, France. ludovic.calandreau@inra.fr.
- INRA, PRC, CNRS, IFCE, Université de Tours, 37380 Nouzilly, France. raymond.nowak@inra.fr.
- INRA, PRC, CNRS, IFCE, Université de Tours, 37380 Nouzilly, France. lea.lansade@inra.fr.
Grant Funding
- Cognition-u00e9quitation / IFCE (Institut Franu00e7ais du Cheval et de l'Equitation)
Conflict of Interest Statement
References
- Waller BM, Micheletta J. Facial Expression in non-human animals. Emot. Rev. 2013;5:54–59.
- Briefer EF. Vocal contagion of emotions in non-human animals.. Proc Biol Sci 2018 Feb 28;285(1873).
- Kikusui T, Takigami S, Takeuchi Y, Mori Y. Alarm pheromone enhances stress-induced hyperthermia in rats.. Physiol Behav 2001 Jan;72(1-2):45-50.
- Bredy TW, Barad M. Social modulation of associative fear learning by pheromone communication.. Learn Mem 2009 Jan;16(1):12-8.
- Špinka M. Social dimension of emotions and its implication for animal welfare. Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci. 2012;138:170–181.
- Waller BM, Whitehouse J, Micheletta J. Macaques can predict social outcomes from facial expressions.. Anim Cogn 2016 Sep;19(5):1031-6.
- Parr LA, Heintz M. Facial expression recognition in rhesus monkeys, Macaca mulatta.. Anim Behav 2009 Jun;77(6):1507-1513.
- Micheletta J, Whitehouse J, Parr LA, Waller BM. Facial expression recognition in crested macaques (Macaca nigra).. Anim Cogn 2015 Jul;18(4):985-90.
- Parr LA. The discrimination of faces and their emotional content by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).. Ann N Y Acad Sci 2003 Dec;1000:56-78.
- Albuquerque N, Guo K, Wilkinson A, Savalli C, Otta E, Mills D. Dogs recognize dog and human emotions.. Biol Lett 2016 Jan;12(1):20150883.
- Müller CA, Schmitt K, Barber AL, Huber L. Dogs can discriminate emotional expressions of human faces.. Curr Biol 2015 Mar 2;25(5):601-5.
- Siniscalchi M, d'Ingeo S, Fornelli S, Quaranta A. Lateralized behavior and cardiac activity of dogs in response to human emotional vocalizations.. Sci Rep 2018 Jan 8;8(1):77.
- Tate AJ, Fischer H, Leigh AE, Kendrick KM. Behavioural and neurophysiological evidence for face identity and face emotion processing in animals.. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 2006 Dec 29;361(1476):2155-72.
- Bellegarde LGA, Haskell MJ, Duvaux-Ponter C, Weiss A, Boissy A, Erhard HW. Face-based perception of emotions in dairy goats. Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci. 2017;193:51–59.
- Nawroth C, Albuquerque N, Savalli C, Single MS, McElligott AG. Goats prefer positive human emotional facial expressions.. R Soc Open Sci 2018 Aug;5(8):180491.
- Massaro DW, Egan PB. Perceiving affect from the voice and the face.. Psychon Bull Rev 1996 Jun;3(2):215-21.
- Faragó T, Pongrácz P, Miklósi A, Huber L, Virányi Z, Range F. Dogs' expectation about signalers' body size by virtue of their growls.. PLoS One 2010 Dec 15;5(12):e15175.
- Bálint A, Faragó T, Dóka A, Miklósi Á, Pongrácz P. Beware, I am big and non-dangerous!—Playfully growling dogs are perceived larger than their actual size by their canine audience. Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci. 2013;148:128–137.
- Ratcliffe VF, McComb K, Reby D. Cross-modal discrimination of human gender by domestic dogs. Anim. Behav. 2014;91:127–135.
- Izumi A, Kojima S. Matching vocalizations to vocalizing faces in a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes).. Anim Cogn 2004 Jul;7(3):179-84.
- Payne C, Bachevalier J. Crossmodal integration of conspecific vocalizations in rhesus macaques.. PLoS One 2013;8(11):e81825.
- Evans TA, Howell S, Westergaard GC. Auditory--visual cross-modal perception of communicative stimuli in tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella).. J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process 2005 Oct;31(4):399-406.
- Turcsán B, Szánthó F, Miklósi Á, Kubinyi E. Fetching what the owner prefers? Dogs recognize disgust and happiness in human behaviour.. Anim Cogn 2015 Jan;18(1):83-94.
- Trösch M, Ringhofer M, Yamamoto S, Lemarchand J, Parias C, Lormant F, Lansade L. Horses prefer to solicit a person who previously observed a food-hiding process to access this food: A possible indication of attentional state attribution.. Behav Processes 2019 Sep;166:103906.
- Ringhofer M, Yamamoto S. Domestic horses send signals to humans when they face with an unsolvable task.. Anim Cogn 2017 May;20(3):397-405.
- Smith AV, Proops L, Grounds K, Wathan J, McComb K. Functionally relevant responses to human facial expressions of emotion in the domestic horse (Equus caballus).. Biol Lett 2016 Feb;12(2):20150907.
- Catala A, Mang B, Wallis L, Huber L. Dogs demonstrate perspective taking based on geometrical gaze following in a Guesser-Knower task.. Anim Cogn 2017 Jul;20(4):581-589.
- Chijiiwa H, Kuroshima H, Hori Y, Anderson JR, Fujita K. Dogs avoid people who behave negatively to their owner: Third-party affective evaluation. Anim. Behav. 2015;106:123–127.
- Schuetz A, Farmer K, Krueger K. Social learning across species: horses (Equus caballus) learn from humans by observation.. Anim Cogn 2017 May;20(3):567-573.
- Briefer EF, Mandel R, Maigrot AL, Briefer Freymond S, Bachmann I, Hillmann E. Perception of emotional valence in horse whinnies.. Front Zool 2017;14:8.
- Lansade L, Nowak R, Lainé AL, Leterrier C, Bonneau C, Parias C, Bertin A. Facial expression and oxytocin as possible markers of positive emotions in horses.. Sci Rep 2018 Oct 2;8(1):14680.
- Proops L, Grounds K, Smith AV, McComb K. Animals Remember Previous Facial Expressions that Specific Humans Have Exhibited.. Curr Biol 2018 May 7;28(9):1428-1432.e4.
- Baba C, Kawai M, Takimoto-Inose A. Are Horses (Equus caballus) Sensitive to Human Emotional Cues?. Animals (Basel) 2019 Aug 29;9(9).
- Wathan J, Proops L, Grounds K, McComb K. Horses discriminate between facial expressions of conspecifics.. Sci Rep 2016 Dec 20;6:38322.
- Smith AV, Proops L, Grounds K, Wathan J, Scott SK, McComb K. Domestic horses (Equus caballus) discriminate between negative and positive human nonverbal vocalisations.. Sci Rep 2018 Aug 29;8(1):13052.
- Nakamura K, Takimoto-Inose A, Hasegawa T. Cross-modal perception of human emotion in domestic horses (Equus caballus).. Sci Rep 2018 Jun 21;8(1):8660.
- Calvo MG, Fernández-Martín A, Recio G, Lundqvist D. Human Observers and Automated Assessment of Dynamic Emotional Facial Expressions: KDEF-dyn Database Validation.. Front Psychol 2018;9:2052.
- Lima CF, Castro SL, Scott SK. When voices get emotional: a corpus of nonverbal vocalizations for research on emotion processing.. Behav Res Methods 2013 Dec;45(4):1234-45.
- Friard O, Gamba M. BORIS: A free, versatile open-source event-logging software for video/audio coding and live observations. Methods Ecol. Evol. 2016;7:1325–1330.
- Koo TK, Li MY. A Guideline of Selecting and Reporting Intraclass Correlation Coefficients for Reliability Research.. J Chiropr Med 2016 Jun;15(2):155-63.
- Lansade L, Bouissou MF, Erhard HW. Fearfulness in horses: A temperament trait stables across time and situations. Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci. 2008;115:182–200.
- Le Scolan N, Hausberger M, Wolff A. Stability over situations in temperamental traits of horses as revealed by experimental and scoring approaches.. Behav Processes 1997 Dec;41(3):257-66.
- Seaman SC, Davidson HPB, Waran NK. How reliable is temperament assessment in the domestic horse (Equus caballus)?. Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci. 2002;78:175–191.
- Kuznetsova A., Brockhoff P.B., Christensen R.H.B. lmerTest: Tests for random and fixed effects for linear mixed effect models. [(accessed on 23 October 2019)]; Available online: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lmerTest.
- Proops L, McComb K. Cross-modal individual recognition in domestic horses (Equus caballus) extends to familiar humans.. Proc Biol Sci 2012 Aug 22;279(1741):3131-8.
- Lampe JF, Andre J. Cross-modal recognition of human individuals in domestic horses (Equus caballus).. Anim Cogn 2012 Jul;15(4):623-30.
- Proops L, McComb K, Reby D. Cross-modal individual recognition in domestic horses (Equus caballus).. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2009 Jan 20;106(3):947-51.
Citations
This article has been cited 27 times.- Jardat P, Destrez A, Damon F, Tanguy-Guillo N, Lainé AL, Parias C, Reigner F, Ferreira VHB, Calandreau L, Lansade L. Human emotional odours influence horses' behaviour and physiology. PLoS One 2026;21(1):e0337948.
- Ricci-Bonot C, Brosche K, Baragli P, Nicol C. A systematic review on the effect of individual characteristics and management practices on equine cognition. Anim Cogn 2025 Nov 26;28(1):96.
- Larrigaldie I, Damon F, Brimaud D, Lansade L, Schaal B, Destrez A. Behaviour of ewes and lambs in response to human emotional odours. Sci Rep 2025 Nov 24;15(1):45234.
- d'Ingeo S, Siniscalchi M, Quaranta A, Cousillas H, Hausberger M. Chronic State and Relationship to Humans Influence How Horses Decode Emotions in Human Voices: A Brain and Behavior Study. Animals (Basel) 2025 Nov 5;15(21).
- Lepy C, Letranchant A, Aniorte JL, Bedos J, Hotchkin R, Corcos M, Robin M, Piot MA. Equine therapy in the management of teenagers with anorexia nervosa: a qualitative study. Eat Weight Disord 2025 Aug 16;30(1):66.
- Gusev E, Sarapultsev A, Komelkova M. Evolutionary Trajectories of Consciousness: From Biological Foundations to Technological Horizons. Brain Sci 2025 Jul 9;15(7).
- Janczarek I, Gazda I, Barłowska J, Kurnik J, Łuszczyński J. Social Isolation of Horses vs. Support Provided by a Human. Animals (Basel) 2025 Jun 3;15(11).
- Jardat P, Yamamoto S, Ringhofer M, Tanguy-Guillo N, Parias C, Reigner F, Calandreau L, Lansade L. Emotional contagion of fear and joy from humans to horses using a combination of facial and vocal cues. Sci Rep 2025 May 21;15(1):17689.
- Matlock SK, Singh A, Grandin T, Merritt T, Nett T, Reega SJ, Peters BC. Behavioral and physiological indicators of stress in horses during an equine-assisted learning program for youth with a history of trauma. Transl Anim Sci 2025;9:txaf027.
- Hall C, Kay R. Living the good life? A systematic review of behavioural signs of affective state in the domestic horse (Equus caballus) and factors relating to quality of life. Part 2: Horse-human interactions. Anim Welf 2024;33:e41.
- Tomberg C, Petagna M, de Selliers de Moranville LA. Spontaneous eye blinks in horses (Equus caballus) are modulated by attention. Sci Rep 2024 Aug 20;14(1):19336.
- Bordin C, Raspa F, Greppi M, Harris P, Ellis AD, Roggero A, Palestrini C, Cavallini D, Bergero D, Valle E. Pony feeding management: the role of morphology and hay feeding methods on intake rate, ingestive behaviors and mouth shaping. Front Vet Sci 2024;11:1332207.
- Pereira-Figueiredo I, Rosa I, Sancho Sanchez C. Forced Handling Decreases Emotionality but Does Not Improve Young Horses' Responses toward Humans and their Adaptability to Stress. Animals (Basel) 2024 Mar 2;14(5).
- Müller-Klein A, Braun MN, Ferreira de Sá DS, Michael T, Link-Dorner U, Lass-Hennemann J. A Relaxed Horse-A Relaxed Client? An Experimental Investigation of the Effects of Therapy Horses' Stress on Clients' Stress, Mood, and Anxiety. Animals (Basel) 2024 Feb 13;14(4).
- Jardat P, Liehrmann O, Reigner F, Parias C, Calandreau L, Lansade L. Horses discriminate between human facial and vocal expressions of sadness and joy. Anim Cogn 2023 Sep;26(5):1733-1742.
- Wilson VAD, Bethell EJ, Nawroth C. The use of gaze to study cognition: limitations, solutions, and applications to animal welfare. Front Psychol 2023;14:1147278.
- de Mouzon C, Leboucher G. Multimodal Communication in the Human-Cat Relationship: A Pilot Study. Animals (Basel) 2023 May 3;13(9).
- Gouyet C, Ringhofer M, Yamamoto S, Jardat P, Parias C, Reigner F, Calandreau L, Lansade L. Horses cross-modally recognize women and men. Sci Rep 2023 Mar 8;13(1):3864.
- Kappel S, Ramirez Montes De Oca MA, Collins S, Herborn K, Mendl M, Fureix C. Do you see what I see? Testing horses' ability to recognise real-life objects from 2D computer projections. Anim Cogn 2023 Jul;26(4):1147-1159.
- Jardat P, Destrez A, Damon F, Menard-Peroy Z, Parias C, Barrière P, Keller M, Calandreau L, Lansade L. Horses discriminate human body odors between fear and joy contexts in a habituation-discrimination protocol. Sci Rep 2023 Feb 25;13(1):3285.
- Wiśniewska A, Janczarek I, Tkaczyk E, Wilk I, Janicka W, Próchniak T, Kaczmarek B, Pokora E, Łuszczyński J. Minimizing the Effects of Social Isolation of Horses by Contact with Animals of a Different Species: The Domestic Goat as an Example. Animals (Basel) 2022 Sep 2;12(17).
- Jardat P, Ringhofer M, Yamamoto S, Gouyet C, Degrande R, Parias C, Reigner F, Calandreau L, Lansade L. Horses form cross-modal representations of adults and children. Anim Cogn 2023 Mar;26(2):369-377.
- Maigrot AL, Hillmann E, Briefer EF. Cross-species discrimination of vocal expression of emotional valence by Equidae and Suidae. BMC Biol 2022 May 24;20(1):106.
- Jardat P, Calandreau L, Ferreira V, Gouyet C, Parias C, Reigner F, Lansade L. Pet-directed speech improves horses' attention toward humans. Sci Rep 2022 Mar 11;12(1):4297.
- Pérez-Manrique A, Gomila A. Emotional contagion in nonhuman animals: A review. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci 2022 Jan;13(1):e1560.
- Hockenhull J, Bell C, White J, Rogers S. Response of UK Horse, Pony and Donkey Owners to the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Animals (Basel) 2021 Apr 23;11(5).
- Lansade L, Colson V, Parias C, Reigner F, Bertin A, Calandreau L. Human Face Recognition in Horses: Data in Favor of a Holistic Process. Front Psychol 2020;11:575808.