Lighthouse News Daily

Breaking Daily News

Monday, April 12, 2021
Log in
  • Headlines
  • Business
  • Education
  • Entertainment
  • Sports
  • Technology
  • U.S.
  • World
  • Latest News
    • Inflatable Greenhouse Could Be A Food Source In The Outer Space
    • YouTube for Children Being Launched by Google
    • Some Animals Produce Natural Sunscreen to Protect Themselves from Radiation, New Study Shows
    • A New Genetic Map Tracks Down Dog Breeds And Their Evolution
    • Lack Of Sleep Causes Brain Cells To Slow Down
    • Meet Lyuba, the Best-Preserved Baby Mammoth in the World
    • Reports of Great White Shark Spottings Around Wells, Maine
    • Minecraft Adds Hour of Code Designer Tutorial
    • The de Broglie-Bohm Theory Is Back and It’s Surreal
    • Could High Carbon Dioxide Concentration Make Earth Greener?
You are here: Home / Health / Horses Can Decipher Facial Expressions, Scientists Reveal

Horses Can Decipher Facial Expressions, Scientists Reveal

February 11, 2016 By Renee Johnson Leave a Comment

Email, RSS Follow

facial expressionsHorses can decipher facial expressions, distinguishing between positive and negative emotions, a recent study has revealed.

The surprising findings were presented on Wednesday, February 10, in the journal Biology Letters, following unprecedented research conducted by experts at the University of Sussex, in the United Kingdom.

The experiment focused on a group of 28 horses selected from 5 boarding stables and riding schools across Surrey and Sussex during a period spanning from April 2014 to February 2015.

The equine creatures didn’t receive any instruction prior to the trial, because study authors wanted to investigate instinctive reactions, that hadn’t been modeled or influenced by trainers beforehand.

The human volunteers who took part in the study also had little information to rely on, so that their assessments could be as objective and accurate as possible.

What researchers required the human participants to do was to expose the horses to large, high definition photographs depicting various emotions, and to record the animals’ subsequent reactions.

All the images had the same male protagonist, whose face was completely unfamiliar to the equine subjects.
In some of the photos, the man was looking happy and approachable, as evidenced by his warm grin; in the rest of the visual materials he appeared to be menacing and angry, as suggested by his frown and by his bared teeth.

Volunteers jotted down observations and notes detailing the horses’ reactions to the images, and at the same time researchers monitored the animals’ heart rate, in order to identify any potential changes.

At the end of the experiment, all this data was aggregated and analyzed, and it soon became obvious that all the horses had had similar manifestations when confronted with specific facial expressions, adopting the same type of behavior after identifying a certain emotion.

More precisely, upon encountering an ominous countenance, the horses’ heart rates escalated significantly, and other commonly encountered stress symptoms also became more prominent. In addition, the animals tilted their heads, so that they could gaze at the photo with their left eye.

As study authors explain, this reaction was extremely telling, given the fact that information captured by the left eye is normally decoded and interpreted in the right hemisphere of the brain, which is exactly the region where threatening stimuli are detected and processed.

This suggests that horses were able to identify emotions and categorize them correctly, in order to skillfully adapt their own behavior to that of their human counterparts.

Reactions were much stronger when it came to negative emotions displayed by the man in the photograph, than when it came to positive feelings, probably because recognizing dangerous situations is much more vital to survival than taking advantage of favorable circumstances.

Prior research had shown that dogs also look at the forbidding faces of their masters with their left eye, distinguishing menacing facial expressions and reacting accordingly.

Similarly, sheep had been proven to be soothed simply when seeing the picture of another ewe, and it had also been determined that they can recognize and recall up to 10 human beings and around 50 sheep for even 2 years.

Horses however hadn’t been studied so thoroughly, even though they had been shown to have a greater variety of facial gestures than dogs or chimpanzees, being surpassed solely by cats in terms of expressiveness.

That is why these new findings are quite ground-breaking, indicating that the ability to correctly process facial cues and respond to them appropriately may be more common in the animal kingdom than we might have guessed.

In fact, it appears that many creatures such as horses or dogs can reliably identify emotions experienced not just by members of the same species, but also by human beings.

This may be because as domestic pets, these animals have come to rely on human beings as providers of food, care and shelter. As a result, they’ve had to learn to read human emotions in order to adjust their behavior based on the wishes and caprices of their owners.

According to co-author Karen McComb, it may be that deciphering facial expressions is a skill that horses and dogs have developed across generations, until it became innate and instinctual.

Alternatively, this talent may simply be the result of each animal’s own interactions with human beings, being therefore based on experience and not on ancestral knowledge.

Image Source: Flickr

Email, RSS Follow

Filed Under: Health

Pages

  • About/Contact
  • AccomplishNow Sandra Rechsteiner | A Journey to Self-Acceptance
  • Privacy Policy GDPR
  • Staff
  • Terms and Conditions

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 17 other subscribers

Charles Haley Says Brady Will be Haunted by Deflategate

February 5, 2015 By Grant Hamersma Leave a Comment

World’s Tiniest Snail is 10 Times Smaller than a Needle’s Eye

September 29, 2015 By David Kellen Leave a Comment

Mega Testing End to End Encryption Video Service

January 22, 2015 By David Kellen Leave a Comment

RadioShack Booted Off NYSE

February 3, 2015 By Barbara Mast Leave a Comment

Netflix Stock Taking Off After Posting Earnings

January 21, 2015 By David Kellen Leave a Comment

Monster Asteroid Expected to Whizz Past Earth on Halloween

October 20, 2015 By Lonnie Davidson 1 Comment

Lawmakers Look to End Travel Restrictions to Cuba

January 29, 2015 By Lonnie Davidson Leave a Comment

Florida Woman Driving under Influence while Live Streaming on Periscope

October 13, 2015 By Lonnie Davidson Leave a Comment

Related Articles

  • patient and doctor shaking hands

    Always Seeing the Same Doctor Lowers Early Death Risk (Study)

    Jun 29, 2018
  • people who work out

    What Happens When You Work Out

    Jun 28, 2018
  • female flight attendant

    Flight Attendants, More Likely to Develop Some Types of Cancer (Study)

    Jun 26, 2018
  • overweight person

    Body-Positive Movement Likely Contributes to Obesity Crisis (Study)

    Jun 25, 2018
  • Alzheimer's symptoms

    Herpes Virus Might Be Linked to Alzheimer’s (Study)

    Jun 22, 2018
  • cup of coffee

    Coffee Might Be Good for Your Heart, But with a Limit (Study)

    Jun 22, 2018
  • Parkinson's in the brain

    Parkinson’s Drugs Can Make People Gamblers or Sex Addicts

    Jun 21, 2018
  • freshly-made pizza

    Why Your Brain Loves Fatty, High-Carb Foods (Study)

    Jun 19, 2018
  • group of teens

    Teens Having Less Sex, Doing Less Drugs, More Are Depressed

    Jun 15, 2018
  • woman sleeping

    Too Much or Too Little Sleep are Both Bad for Your Health (Study)

    Jun 14, 2018

Categories

  • Business
  • Education
  • Entertainment
  • Headlines
  • Health
  • Nature
  • Science
  • Sports
  • Technology
  • U.S.
  • Uncategorized
  • World

Copyright © 2021 lighthousenewsdaily.com

About | Contact · Staff · Terms and Conditions · Privacy Policy