Animals & nature · 2018
How do horses react when a person's face and voice express different emotions, and does a familiar voice matter?
Horses reacted faster when the emotion in a voice did not match a previously shown facial expression. They also looked at the speaker longer when the mismatched voice belonged to their caretaker, but not when it belonged to a stranger. This experiment suggests that horses connect emotional cues across faces and voices, although the looking-time result depended on whose voice they heard.
Details
Researchers tested whether horses connect emotions seen in a human face with emotions heard in a human voice. They showed the horses a photograph of a facial expression, then played a voice from a speaker in front of the screen. The face and voice either expressed matching or different emotions. The approach tests whether an unexpected pairing changes an animal's behavior.
Horses responded significantly faster to the voice when the emotions did not match. They also looked at the speaker significantly longer after a mismatch involving their caretaker's voice. That longer-looking response was not found with a stranger's voice; this does not establish that horses could not detect a mismatch involving a stranger.
The authors interpreted the findings as evidence that horses recognize human emotional states across sight and sound. The evidence comes from response speed and looking time in this experimental task, rather than a direct measure of what horses understand about emotions. The abstract does not report the number of horses or the size of the behavioral differences.
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