The human ability to interpret affective states in horses’ body language: The role of emotion recognition ability and previous experience with horses

Abstract

Background: Effective communication and bonding between species depend on understanding the emotional state and the expressive behavior of the counterpart. This is of particular importance for human-horse relationships, as misunderstanding horses’ communicative signals can easily lead to severe injuries. While the published evidence suggests that the human ability to correctly interpret equine affective states is far from perfect, this evidence is inconclusive regarding the influence of previous experience with horses. Further, the role of emotion recognition ability as well as the interaction of the two factors – horse-experience and emotion recognition ability – are poorly understood. Method: To fill this gap, we employed an online survey asking participants to interpret 32 different photographs of horses’ body language depicting different affective states. Additionally, we assessed participants’ emotion recognition ability by means of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test and asked them to provide sociodemographic information (i.e., age, gender, horse-experience). Results: Our results suggest (1) that horse-experienced individuals performed better in interpreting horses’ affective states than horse-inexperienced participants and (2) that participants with a high emotion recognition ability performed better in interpreting horses’ affective states than participants with a low emotion recognition ability. We did not find evidence for an interaction of emotion recognition ability and horse-experience. Importantly, our results remained significant irrespective of how we defined “experienced” vs. “inexperienced” and after controlling for unequal gender distributions across these two groups. Discussion: Our study showed that previous experience with horses and emotion recognition ability both affect the interpretation of horses‘ affective states. The effect for previous experience was much larger than for emotion recognition ability. However, even horse-experienced individuals only correctly identified about 50% of the affective states. The findings are discussed with regard to findings from previous and directions for future research.