ArticleScientific reports2023
Horses discriminate human body odors between fear and joy contexts in a habituation-discrimination protocol.
Article in Scientific reports, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Dogs (Canis familiaris) distinguish conspecific emotional chemosignals.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- Behaviour of ewes and lambs in response to human emotional odours.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Chronic State and Relationship to Humans Influence How Horses Decode Emotions in Human Voices: A Brain and Behavior Study.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Emotional contagion of fear and joy from humans to horses using a combination of facial and vocal cues.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Challenge of Defining Laterality in Horses: Is It Laterality or Just Asymmetry?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Review
- Behavioral responses of domestic cats to human odor.PloS one · 2025Article
- Do sheep (Ovis aries) discriminate human emotional odors?Animal cognition · 2024Article
- A Review of the Effects of Some Extrinsic Factors on Mice Used in Research.Comparative medicine · 2023Review
- Seasonal Variation of Laboratory Animals as a Consideration for Research Reproducibility.Comparative medicine · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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 (habituation), and then, the same odor and a novel odor were presented simultaneously (discrimination). The two odors were from the same human in the fear or joy condition; the experimenter and the observer were blinded to the condition. Horses sniffed the novel odor longer than the repeated odor, indicating they discriminated between human odors produced in fear and joy contexts. Moreover, differences in habituation speed and asymmetric nostril use according to odor suggest differences in the emotional processing of the two odors.
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