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posted by martyb on Friday April 27 2018, @03:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the Geee-Wilbuuur,-you-look-angry-todaaay dept.

Beware the long face: horses remember your mood

The following news is straight from the horse's mouth: our equine companions can remember human facial expressions, and an angry grimace will leave a horse more wary of that individual, scientists claim.

The research follows previous work by the team from University of Sussex which compiled a directory of horse facial expressions and revealed that Black Beauty can read your emotions – a phenomenon also seen in dogs.

"We knew that horses could register emotional expressions, so we wanted to know if they could remember them, so that they can actually use those memories to guide their future interactions with specific individuals," said Karen McComb, co-author of the study and professor of animal behaviour and cognition at the University of Sussex.

McComb and colleagues analysed data from 11 horses who had been shown a photograph of a human pulling an angry face and 10 horses shown a picture of a human smiling.

Each horse was shown a large photograph of one of two participants for two minutes; three to six hours later they were brought face-to-face with the person they had seen in the photograph who was sporting a neutral expression. To avoid the possibility of giving tell-tale cues, the person was unaware whether it was a happy or angry photo of [them] that had been previously shown to the horse.

The small study, published in the journal Current Biology [open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.03.035] [DX], reveal that horses who had been earlier been[sic] shown an angry photo of the participant spent longer viewing them with their left eye than those who had seen a happy photo.

That, said McComb is important because information from the left eye is sent to the right hemisphere of the brain, where potential threats and dangers are processed. By contrast, those who had seen the happy photo spent longer looking at the person with their right eye than those who had seen an angry image. "The left hemisphere of the brain connects to the right gaze and is more specialised for prosocial, positive-type reactions," said McComb.

Also at EurekAlert.

Related: New Tech Aims to Improve Communication between Dogs and Humans
Your Dog Understands More Than You Think
Dogs Use Facial Expressions to Influence Humans


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @01:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 27 2018, @01:55PM (#672577)

    Most animals can determine who jerks are, and either stay away from them, or try to bite them.

    It's illegal for most civilized folks to bite a jerk, and running away doesn't help as it just makes the runners lose ground.

    Forums either encourage the activity because of the conflict that many people enjoy to witness, or even pile on in an us-versus-other fight, or the more tolerant types that want to keep the walls clean of mud can try to stamp it out while trying to ignore the ignorant cries of censorship and freedom of speech.

    It's too bad we can't just change the music on the jukebox to get rid of the customers we don't want that sit around taking up seats and just drinking the free refills and heckling people that arrive that are not like them, denying us of more valuable contributions. It's too bad so many people are uncomfortable with people that aren't just like them.