GENERAL COMMENTARY published: 10 March 2014 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00173 Future research direction on decoding animal well-being: the case of the horse Nutankumar S. Thingujam* Department of Psychology, Sikkim University, Gangtok, India *Correspondence:
[email protected] Edited by: Mattie Tops, VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands Reviewed by: Clémence Lesimple, Laboratoire EthoS—UMR 6552, France Keywords: animal wellbeing, observation, gender, age, personality, affectivity A commentary on of the decoder. But, such research attempt was associated with the higher accu- requires several observers to enable the racy of recognition of several emotional How accurate are we at assessing others’ use of inferential statistical analysis. For expressions. In particular, overall emotion well-being? The example of welfare assess- example, 30 male and 30 female trained recognition from the human face was asso- ment in horses observers could serve as the observers of ciated positively with conscientiousness, by Lesimple, C., and Hausberger, M. (2014). the horse’s SB/ARB with affectivity and openness to experience, extraversion, but Front. Psychol. 5:21. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg. personality measures as controlled vari- negatively with neuroticism (Matsumoto 2014.00021 ables. Alternatively, 30 young (say, 20–30 et al., 2000). Similarly, other researchers years) and 30 (say, 60 and above years) old also reported that human emotion decod- The study by Lesimple and Hausberger trained observers could form the sample ing of sadness, happiness, and contempt (2014) compared in 26 cases the decod- for a study in which affectivity and person- from the facial expression was predicted ingofwellbeingofthehorsebyacare- ality could be used as controlled variables. by openness to experience; sadness decod- taker through a questionnaire on the one ing by agreeableness; anger recognition OBSERVERS’ GENDER AND DECODING hand and an experienced outside observer by extraversion (Mill et al., 2009).