The Therapeutic Effects of Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy on Lowering Aggression Levels Through an Increase of Emotion Regulation

The EAP program will span over the duration of 5 weeks, each week having a 1-hour session. 50 minutes will be allocated to interacting with the horses and the activities while the remaining 10 minutes will be allocated to the clinical processing of the behavior, thoughts and emotions that are observed during the session. This processing will be guided by trained therapists who hold the relevant qualifications (i.e. equine-assisted psychotherapy certification). 2 horses (an Oldenburg and a pony, aged 19 and 14 respectively), 2 therapists, and 2 experienced horse handlers will be present throughout the sessions. Each 1-hour session will consist a maximum of 8 participants that will be split into two groups of 4 such that 1 horse, 1 therapist and 1 experienced horse handler are attached to them.

The design of the experiment will be a single-blind Randomized Controlled Trial. Participants will be told that this study aims to investigate the therapeutic effects of two different EAP programs (either watching video clips related to horses or actual interactions with horses) and that they will be randomly assigned to either one. In actuality, participants are randomly assigned to either an intervention group, an active-control group or a placebo-control group. 3 time points of data collection are measured throughout the 5-week duration - t1 before the 1st session, t2 after the 3rd session, and t3 after the final session. All participants will go through the same questionnaire administered at each time point during the 5-week duration regardless of their assigned group. Participants in the intervention group will go through the 5-week EAP program consisting of the clinical processing following some activities found in EAP manuals. Participants in the active-control group will undergo a 5-week program that only involves interactions with horses without any clinical input (i.e. commonly coined as animal-assisted activities). Participants in the placebo-control group will undergo a 5-week movie screening of 1 hour each session that is related to horses in the lab.

Participant recruitment will begin as soon as possible once approval has been given and should not take longer than 2 weeks to recruit a total of 120 undergraduate students from both NUS and NTU.

The 5-week intervention program will be briefly structured as such:

Session 1: Introduction to grooming and horse safety This introductory session is aimed at getting participants to be familiar with the safety features when working with these horses as well as to be attentive to the warning cues that horses display that is indicative of their mood. Once that has been briefed, participants will be taught how to groom the horse as part of learning natural horsemanship skills. These includes brushing and cleaning the hooves of the horse.