Emotions and Behaviors Tied Together

Let's dig into it, Emotions and Behaviors, what's trainable, what's controllable, what can we do to have happy, and emotionally healthy learners?

Operant behaviors are what we focus on mostly, they are behaviors that are under the control of the learner. They are triggered by the antecedents, the external and internal environments (what's happening around the horse and what's happening inside the horse, physically and emotionally). They are encouraged or discouraged by the consequences to the learner's environments after the behavior. This is to say, they can be reinforced or punished, and they can be put on cue to utilize out of environmental context. Operant behaviors are what we train.

Emotions however are more complicated than that. Emotions are not under control of the learner. Emotions are elicited by the environment (external and internal, like hormone fluctuations, hunger, thirst, sexual desires, etc...). I call emotions the “interpreters” they observe the antecedents and the consequences and interpret them. The emotions they trigger tell the horses what behaviors to choose from and whether their behavior choice “worked” or not. If the antecedents triggered FEAR, the horse will choose between fight/flight behavior choices, then if the consequences is relief from FEAR it'll be reinforcing. So the emotions interpret the antecedents and consequences for the learner.

The individual can not control what emotions they feel and there will be behaviors that accompany all of these emotions when they are felt. These behaviors are called “Respondent” they are a reflexive response to their environment that is involuntary. This is like salivating at food, increased heart rate, facial expressions, even some big behaviors like fight/flight responses. The learner is not under control of these responses to the environment, so of course we have no control over them either. We can't reinforce an emotion or put it on cue to make it happy when we want it. We can't reinforce the respondent behaviors to happen as we choose either.

We can however, CONDITION those emotions and their respondents. Classical/Pavlovian/Respondent Conditioning is not ABC, not reinforcing, not punishing, not putting on cue - but simple pairing X=Y. There are stimuli we are born having feelings about and having a set of respondent behaviors associated with. This is like a sudden movement triggers FEAR, which elicits it's respondent reflex of flinching, jumping, or spooking (in most horses). The emotional response to the sudden movement didn't need to be learned, sudden movements are inherently fear-inducing to horses. They are born knowing that a sudden movement is scary. They are also born equipped with fight/flight responses, like shying, spooking, flinching, etc... These were not learned, they are inherent, we call it an “unconditioned stimulus” (despite some controversy on the title, as they were conditioned through genetic and ancestral history).

We can take this “unconditioned stimulus” and pair it with anything to condition new things to elicit the same emotional and behavioral response. So, we can take a new stimulus that doesn't have a meaning to the horse, maybe a hand gesture from the human, then we can pair it repeatedly with the “unconditioned stimulus”. We take the new stimulus, then add the unconditioned stimulus, repeat, until the new stimulus predicts the old stimulus and the horse is responding the same way with just the new stimulus. This is like the dog salivating at the sound of the bell that was conditioned to predict food. The respondent emotional response to the food was paired with the bell until the bell elicited the same response.

So we can take this concept all over our training. Conditioning every aspect of our training to elicit the good feeling emotional responses through pairing everything in our training and our relationship with the good things horses love. So while this isn't under the learner's control, nor our control, we do have a lot of ways to influence and support healthier, happier emotional states. By arranging the antecedents to elicit the good emotions, by conditioning what isn't naturally wonderful, and reducing the aversive stimuli where possible.