Université Rennes 1, UMR CNRS 6552, laboratoire Ethologie Animale et Humaine, Rennes, France.
PLoS One. 2010 Aug 26;5(8):e12434. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0012434.
Experiencing acute pain can affect the social behaviour of both humans and animals and can increase the risk that they exhibit aggressive or violent behaviour. However, studies have focused mainly on the impact of acute rather than chronic painful experiences. As recent results suggest that chronic pain or chronic discomfort could increase aggressiveness in humans and other mammals, we tested here the hypothesis that, in horses, aggression towards humans (a common source of accidents for professionals) could be linked to regularly reported vertebral problems of riding horses.
METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Vertebral examination and standardized behavioural tests were made independently on the same horses. Here we showed that most horses severely affected by vertebral problems were prone to react aggressively towards humans (33/43 horses, chi-square test, df=1, χ(2)=12.30, p<0.001), which was not the case for unaffected or slightly affected horses (9/16 horses, chi-square test, df=1, χ(2)=0.25, p>0.05). The more affected they were, the fewer positive reactions they exhibited (rs=-0.31, p=0.02).
CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: This is to our knowledge the first experimental evidence of such a link between chronic discomfort/potential pain (inferred from the presence of vertebral problems) and aggression, suggesting that chronic painful experiences may act in ways similar to those of acute experiences. Chronic discomfort or pain may often be overlooked when facing "bad tempered" individuals, whether humans or animals. This experimental study confirms the importance of including chronic discomfort or pain as a major factor in interpersonal relations and models of aggression.
经历急性疼痛会影响人类和动物的社会行为，并增加其表现出攻击或暴力行为的风险。然而，研究主要集中在急性疼痛而不是慢性疼痛体验的影响上。由于最近的结果表明，慢性疼痛或慢性不适可能会增加人类和其他哺乳动物的攻击性，我们在这里测试了一个假设，即在马中，对人类的攻击性（对专业人员来说是常见的事故源）可能与经常报告的骑马马的脊柱问题有关。
方法/主要发现：对同一匹马进行了独立的脊柱检查和标准化行为测试。在这里，我们表明，大多数严重受脊柱问题影响的马更容易对人类产生攻击性反应（33/43 匹马，卡方检验，df=1，χ(2)=12.30，p<0.001），而未受影响或受影响较小的马则不然（9/16 匹马，卡方检验，df=1，χ(2)=0.25，p>0.05）。它们受影响越严重，表现出的积极反应越少（rs=-0.31，p=0.02）。
结论/意义：这是我们所知的第一个关于慢性不适/潜在疼痛（从脊柱问题的存在推断而来）与攻击性之间的这种联系的实验证据，表明慢性疼痛体验可能以类似于急性体验的方式发挥作用。在面对“脾气暴躁”的人（无论是人类还是动物）时，慢性不适或疼痛往往会被忽视。这项实验研究证实了将慢性不适或疼痛作为人际关系和攻击模型中的一个主要因素的重要性。
