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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Beware the long face: horses remember your mood [theguardian.com]

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 [theguardian.com] and revealed that Black Beauty can read your emotions [theguardian.com] – a phenomenon also seen in dogs [reuters.com].

"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 that had been previously shown to the horse.

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

Also at EurekAlert [eurekalert.org].

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

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