Study Confirms You Can Really Communicate With Your Cat By Doing This : ScienceAlert

Cats have a reputation for being aloof (and goofy), but if you and your feline friend aren’t bonding, maybe you just aren’t speaking their language.

Fear not: 2020 research has shown that it’s not that hard. You just need to smile at them more. Not in the human way, baring his teeth, but in the cat way, narrowing his eyes and blinking slowly.

By looking at cat-human interactions, the scientists confirmed that this expression makes cats, both familiar and strangers, closer and more receptive to humans.

“As someone who has studied animal behavior and is a cat owner, it’s great to be able to show that cats and humans can communicate in this way,” Karen McComb, a psychologist at the University of Sussex, said in a 2020 statement.

“It’s something that many cat owners already suspected, so it’s exciting to have found evidence of it.”

If you’ve spent any time around cats, you’ve probably seen their “eyes partially closed” facial expressions, accompanied by slow blinking. It is similar to how human eyes narrow when smiling and usually occurs when the cat is relaxed and content. The expression is interpreted as a kind of feline smile.

Anecdotal evidence from cat owners has hinted 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 if cats behaved differently around slow-blinking humans.

In the first experiment, owners slowly blinked at 21 cats from 14 different households. Once the cat was settled and comfortable in one place in their home, the owners were instructed to sit approximately 1 meter away and blink slowly when the cat looked at them. The cameras recorded the faces of the owner and the cat, and the results were compared to how cats blink without human interaction.

The results showed that cats are more likely to blink slowly at their humans after the humans have blinked slowly at them, compared to the no-interaction condition.

The second experiment included 24 cats from eight different households. This time, it wasn’t the owners who blinked, but the researchers, who had had no prior contact with the cat. As a control, the cats were recorded as responding to an unblinking condition, in which humans stared at the cats without blinking.

The researchers performed the same slow blinking process as in the first experiment, adding an outstretched hand toward the cat. And they found that not only were the cats more likely to blink, but they were also more likely to approach the human’s hand 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 yourself with your own cat at home or with cats you find on the street. It’s a great way to improve your bond with cats. Try to squint at them like you would with a smile relaxed. , followed by closing their eyes for a couple of seconds. You will find that they themselves respond in the same way, and you can start a kind of conversation.”

Dogs can be much more enthusiastic than cats, but this news doesn’t come as a surprise to cat lovers. Research in recent years has shown that our feline friends are much more in tune with their human companions than previously assumed and that comparing them to dogs is a disservice.

Cats, for example, respond the same way to humans who are receptive to them, so if you find cats aloof, that could be your problem, not kitty’s. Similarly, cats echo the personality traits of the humans they live with; this may be related to why cats seem to pick up on when their humans are sad. They can also recognize their names (although they choose to ignore them most of the time). And her bonds with her humans run surprisingly deep.

It’s hard to know why cats slowly blink at humans in this way. It has been interpreted as a means of signaling benign intentions, as cats are believed to interpret the uninterrupted gaze as a threat. But it’s also possible that cats have developed the expression since humans respond positively to it. With domesticated animals, it’s often impossible to tell.

Either way, it seems to help forge a relationship. And that’s good to know. Learning to improve our relationships with these enigmatic animals could also be a way to improve their emotional health, not just in the home environment, but in a variety of potentially stressful situations.

“Understanding the positive ways that cats and humans interact can enhance public understanding of cats, improve feline well-being, and give us more information about the sociocognitive abilities of this little-studied species,” said psychologist Tasmin Humphrey of the University of Sussex.

“Our findings could potentially be used to assess the well-being of cats in a variety of settings, including veterinary practices and shelters.”

You’re going to try it right now, aren’t you?

The research has been published in scientific reports.

A version of this article was first published in October 2020.