What is Pat Parelli's view on horse psychology?

Pat Parelli's view of horse psychology is organized around several frameworks that he developed to make the horse's behavioral and emotional responses understandable to riders without deep prior knowledge of horse behavior. His most widely known psychological framework distinguishes between horses by their behavioral tendencies — the left-brain versus right-brain distinction that Parelli uses to describe horses that are more thinking and curious versus those that are more reactive and emotional, combined with the introvert versus extrovert distinction that describes horses who express their energy internally versus externally. These distinctions produce four basic horse personality types in the Parelli framework — Left Brain Introvert, Left Brain Extrovert, Right Brain Introvert, and Right Brain Extrovert — each of which is described as requiring different handling approaches that match the horse's natural tendencies rather than applying a one-size-fits-all method regardless of the individual horse. Parelli also emphasizes the horse's fundamental nature as a prey animal whose behavior is governed by its flight-survival instinct, and his Seven Games framework is designed to work with this nature rather than against it — developing the horse's confidence and trust rather than suppressing its survival responses through force. His psychological framework has been both widely adopted by recreational riders who find it gives them useful language for thinking about their specific horses and criticized by equine behavioral scientists who note that the left-brain/right-brain distinction does not accurately reflect the neuroscience of equine cognition, though the practical utility of having a framework for thinking about individual horse differences has value independent of its scientific accuracy.