It’s common knowledge that horses’ individual personalities play a role in how they behave. Scientists have even developed various equine personality tests—most of which use objective criteria in a scoring system—to determine personality type. But researchers have recently developed a new subjective personality test designed to help us better understand horse behavior.

“Subjective testing for horses allows us to accurately predict their behavior, which has the potential to reduce human-horse accidents,” said Carrie Ijichi, MSc, researcher at the School of Biological Sciences at Queen’s University, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Ijichi and colleagues developed their subjective personality test—a list of questions similar to a quiz in a magazine—based on current equine behavior research, and had the handlers of 146 horses fill out the questionnaire. Then, the team put the horses through a battery of behavior tests to see how the handlers’ personality scores lined up with the way the horses actually behaved.

The team found that the more “neurotic”—meaning anxious, rather than crazy—a horse, based on the handler’s test responses, the more reactive he would be to something appearing suddenly in front of him in the behavior tests. It did not, however, predict how long the horse took to recover from the shock of the surprise.

The team also determined that introverted and extroverted horses handled fearful or unpleasant situations differently. For instance, if an extroverted horse was forced to be near an unpleasant object (e.g., because he’s held by a lead rope), he would resist and try to escape. Introverted horses, on the other hand, “froze” and became totally unresponsive. These behaviors, however, do not necessarily correlate with fear: When unrestrained, introverted horses avoided such objects, whereas extroverted horses were “bold” and curious, approaching new objects to explore them