04/12/2025
๐ซHorses and Human Emotion ๐ซ:
Why Our Energy Matters (and the Science behind it)
Iโve spent my whole life being fascinated by watching how horses respond to people - not just to our cues but to our energy, tension, stress, and often the emotions we donโt even realise weโre carrying.
Since I was a little girl, I have noticed how:
a) A horse who is usually calm, gentle and friendly can become defensive or anxious with someone who arrives tense.
b) A dysregulated horse softens with a calm, grounded handler.
For a long time this was described as โintuitionโ or โhorsemanship feel.โ
But now there is research showing thereโs much more science behind it than many people realise.
Here are some of the key findingsโฆ
๐Horses Respond to Human Emotions๐
โจThey read our facial expressions.
Studies show horses can distinguish between happy and angry human faces.
When shown angry faces, horses tend to look longer with their left eye (which connects to the brain hemisphere that processes negative or threatening stimuli). Their heart rates increase, and so do stress-related behaviours. (Proops, Grounds, Smith & McComb- 2018).
โจThey remember how we looked.
In a follow-up study, horses first saw a photo of a person looking angry or happy.
Hours later, when they met the same person in real life, now with a neutral expression, the horsesโ behaviour changed depending on which expression theyโd seen earlier. This is emotional memory.
(Smith, Wathan, McComb et al -2016).
โจThey react to our tone and vocal cues.
Horses freeze longer and become more vigilant when they hear negative human vocalisations (like growling) and show more relaxed behaviours when they hear positive sounds (like laughter).
(Plotine Jardat et al -2023).
โจ In recent research, horses who simply watched videos of positive or negative humanโhorse interactions showed matching physiological and behavioural responses (Plotine Jardat et al- 2024).
โจInternal Emotional State shapes Learning and Behaviour (Henshall, C., et al- 2022; Olczak, K., et al- 2016).
Research supports several key ideas many horse people have believed for years:
๐ง Emotion influences perception and memory.
If a horse has an emotional experience with you, good or bad, it affects how they interpret you later.
โฃ๏ธ Emotional reactions are embodied.
Changes in posture, tension, heart rate and vigilance arenโt just โbehaviour.โ They reflect internal emotional states.
๐๏ธ Scientists are developing tools to measure equine emotion more objectively.
Work is underway to track things like ear movement, muzzle tension, and eye expression using computer-vision systems.
This is helping researchers map what emotional states look like in the horseโs body.
โ ๏ธ What We Donโt Fully Know Yet
While the evidence for equine emotion is strong, science still has limitations:
โข Most research looks at how horses respond to human emotional cues - it doesnโt prove they experience emotion exactly like we do.
โข Thereโs individual variation: not every horse reacts or learns in the same way.
โข Studies tend to examine basic emotional categories (positive vs negative), not more nuanced states like frustration or insecurity.
โข The idea that emotion โ perception โ memory โ behaviour always follows in a perfect chain is still hard to prove scientifically.
โข And while horses clearly have emotions, they may not โfeelโ in the same subjective way humans do (though perhaps they might!).
The research is clear on this:
โ Horses perceive emotional cues from humans.
โ Their bodies respond โ heart rate, posture, tension, vigilance.
โ They remember emotional experiences with specific people.
โ And those memories influence future behaviour.
This means behaviour is almost always the end point, not the beginning.
When a horse seems โdifficult,โ โsensitive,โ or โreactive,โ the emotional layer is usually whatโs speaking.
Our breathing, our posture, our intention, our stress levels (even the feelings we havenโt acknowledged yet) are all part of the conversation. Horses feel that long before they interpret our cues.
For me, this validates what Iโve seen for years in both my personal dealings with horses as well as in my professional practice:
โญ๏ธA calm, regulated human often creates a soft, regulated horse.
โญ๏ธA tense or anxious human often meets a horse who looks tense or anxious.
Not because the horse is โmisbehavingโ
but because they are responding honestly to the emotional information available to them.
Understanding this changes everything:
โจ how we train
โจ how we handle
โจ how we rehabilitate
โจ how we build partnership
