Horses discriminate human body odors between fear and joy contexts in a habituation-discrimination protocol.

ABSTRACT: Animals are widely believed to sense human emotions through smell. Chemoreception is the most primitive and ubiquitous sense, and brain regions responsible for processing smells are among the oldest structures in mammalian evolution. Thus, chemosignals might be involved in interspecies communication. The communication of emotions is essential for social interactions, but very few studies have clearly shown that animals can sense human emotions through smell. We used a habituation-discrimination protocol to test whether horses can discriminate between human odors produced while feeling fear vs. joy. Horses were presented with sweat odors of humans who reported feeling fear or joy while watching a horror movie or a comedy, respectively. A first odor was presented twice in successive trials (

SUBMITTER: Jardat P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9968287 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature