The Importance of Emotional Arousal

Emotions drive behavior that enhances survival. All mammals have them and they look like ubiquitous biochemical processes throughout the mammalian realm. We can't know what having an emotion feels like for another being, so we can't speak of the experience with total certainty, but the physiological evidence points to animals having feelings of anger, rage, fear, disgust, pleasure, anticipation, sadness, anxiety, and despair.

Horses are an emotional species. Some of them are down-right drama queens. An animal that is occupied with negative emotions is one that can't learn very well, so it is essential to replace negative emotions with positive emotions.

Entry into an emotional state is a reflexive unconscious response to the perceived environment. It is not a choice. It's like salivating when you see yummy food. You can't will yourself to salivate, it just happens when your brain thinks you are about to receive a bite of yummy food.

Respondent conditioning is the modern name for Pavlovian or Classical conditioning. You may remember the classic example of the scientist Pavlov ringing the bell and feeding the dog. Soon ringing the bell alone would be enough to make the dog salivate. But respondent conditioning isn't just about salivating, it's about any kind of reflexive response to environmental change. Remember those emotions? As reflexive responses, they are conditioned through respondent conditioning.

To condition an emotional change in an animal, you have to pair a stimulus you want to use as the cue (Discriminatve Stumulus or SD) with an innate stimulus for the emotional response you would like to control. With a mustang you would like your presence to be a cue for the animal to feel pleasure (or anticipate pleasure). By simply pairing yourself to co-occur with things the mustang already finds pleasurable, you become a stimulus for pleasure. Obviously if you pair yourself with things that the mustang finds fearful, you will become a stimulus for fear. It is so simple, so elegant, and so hard to really control. The mark of a good horseperson is anticipating the factors that will make it difficult to prevent undesired emotional conditioning.

ps. You wouldn't want a horse that couldn't handle a little anxiety now and then.