How Emotions Influence decisions

Today's Lesson from Tank, a way to share her wisdom in her honor as we reach the end of our time with her

Tank has shown me that she's capable of doing the same behaviors with many emotions, and they are DIFFERENT. A behavior done out of avoidance is a different behavior than the same physical action done in seeking. If she learned a behavior because she was working to avoid an aversive I placed on her, then she learned the same physical behavior trained while seeking an appetitive, these were 2 separate behaviors in her mind and while the core behavior is the same, they look very different.

Emotion is inherently tied into the behavior we're training. This is because of the neuropathways in our brains, when we are learning to seek out something we want we are using different chemicals and hormones vs when we are learning through avoidance. These hormones and chemicals get tied into the behavior, through what we now know as Classical/Respondent Conditioning.

Emotions are expressed through respondent behaviors, behaviors we do involuntarily, reflexively. These are behaviors like tightness of muscles, clenching the jaw, heart rate/breathing rate, sweating, drooling, yawning, etc... These behaviors show how a horse feels and they become attached to the Operant (the learned and voluntary) behaviors.

So when I taught her to back up through R- and when I taught her to back up shaped with a target with R+, these behaviors were separate and unique in her mind and expressed differently in her body. It was seeing THIS that made me realize I needed to take the time to reshape and retrain a great deal in her life. That it was worth trying to keep avoidance-based training out of our intentional training tools. To reshape the way she sees training and our relationship, as something to problem solve, work for, seek, and enjoy!