Cats have a reputation for aloofness (and reluctance to communicate), but if you and your feline friend don't feel a connection, maybe you just don't speak their language.
Never fear - 2020 research shows it's not that hard. You just need to smile more at cats. Not in a human way, showing his teeth, but in a cat way, narrowing his eyes and blinking them slowly.
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By observing the interaction between a cat and a human, scientists confirmed that it makes cats - both familiar and unfamiliar - approach and be more responsive to people.
"As someone who has both studied animal behavior and is a cat owner, it is great to be able to show that cats and humans can communicate in this way," University of Sussex psychologist Karen McComb said in a 2020 statement.
"This is something that many cat owners already suspected, so it's exciting to find evidence for it."
If you've spent any time around cats, you've probably seen their 'half-closed eyes' facial expression accompanied by a slow blink. It's similar to how a person's eyes narrow when they smile, and it usually happens when a cat is relaxed and content. This expression is interpreted as a kind of feline smile.
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Anecdotal evidence from cat owners suggests that humans may copy this expression to communicate to cats that we are friendly and open to interaction. So a team of psychologists designed two experiments to determine whether cats would react differently to slow-blinking humans.
In the first experiment, owners slowly blinked their eyes at 21 cats from 14 different households. Once the cat was settled and comfortable in one spot in its home environment, the owners were instructed to sit about 1 meter away and blink slowly when the cat looked at them. The cameras recorded the faces of both the owner and the cat, and the results were compared to how cats blink without human interaction.
The results showed that cats were more likely to slowly blink at their humans after their humans slowly blinked at them compared to the no-interaction condition.
In the second experiment, 24 cats from eight different households were included. This time it was not the owners who blinked, but researchers who had no previous contact with the cat. As a control, cats were recorded responding to a no-blink condition in which humans looked at the cats without blinking.
The researchers performed the same slow-blink process as in the first experiment, adding an outstretched hand toward the cat. And they found that the cats not only blinked more often, but also approached the human's hand more often after the human blinked.
"This study is the first to experimentally investigate the role of slow blinking in cat-human communication," McComb said.
"And it's something you can try with your cat at home or with cats you meet on the street. It's a great way to bond with cats. Try winking at them as if you're doing it with a calm smile, after close your eyes to that for a few seconds. You'll see that they'll respond the same way, and you'll be able to start a conversation."
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Dogs can be more enthusiastic than cats, but this news comes as no surprise to cat lovers. Research in recent years has shown that our feline friends are much more in tune with their hosts than previously thought, and that comparing them to dogs is a disservice.
For example, cats react similarly to people who perceive them, so if you think cats are unusual, that might be a problem with you, not the cats. Also, cats mimic the personality traits of the people they live with - this may be related with why cats seem to sense that their humans are sad. They can also recognize their own names (although they often choose to ignore them). And their bonds with people are surprisingly deep.
It is difficult to understand why cats look slowly at people. This has been interpreted as a means of signaling benign intentions, as cats are believed to interpret continuous gaze as threatening. But it's also possible that cats developed this expression because humans respond positively to it. With domesticated animals, it is often impossible to tell.
Either way, it seems to help build relationships. And that's good to know. Learning how to improve our relationship with these enigmatic animals could also be a way to improve their emotional health—not only in the home environment, but also in a variety of potentially stressful situations.
"Understanding the positive ways cats and humans interact can improve public understanding of cats, improve feline well-being and tell us more about the social-cognitive abilities of this little-studied species," said psychologist Tasmin Humphreys of the University of Sussex.
"Our findings could be used to assess the well-being of cats in a variety of settings, including veterinary practices and shelters."