Think your cat knows how you feel? You might be right.
We often have the impression that our pets understand how we feel. We probably enjoy their companionship because we believe there is a two-way emotional connection to some degree. Science has made it fairly clear that dogs (and horses) recognize human emotions, but the mental lives of cats have been less of a focus. Recently, researchers found what cat owners have probably thought for a long time. Indeed, cats recognize emotional states in humans, and in fellow felines.
Angelo Quaranta and colleagues from the University of Bari in Italy set up a study to measure emotion recognition in cats. The researchers took their study on the road, setting up in the homes of cat owners so the cats could be studied in comfort.
Photo by Gijs Coolen on Unsplash
To test the cats, the researchers simultaneously projected two images of strangers’ faces on a screen in front of the cat who was seated on the owner’s lap. One image showed a happy face, and the other an angry face. At the same time, the researchers played audio recordings from behind the screen of either a happy human laughing or an angry human growling.
It was basically an emotion matching test. Would the cats reveal that they understood one face matched the emotion in the audio recording, and the other didn’t? To answer this, the researchers measured where the cats looked, and how they behaved. (Similar approaches have been used to study the understanding of human babies for decades.)
Cats looked longer at the faces that matched the emotion of the vocalization. That is, they looked at the happy face longer than the angry face when laughter was playing, and the angry face longer than the happy face when the grumbling human voice was playing. They made the match.
The cats’ behavior also revealed that the cats could tell the difference in these emotional signals. When cats heard the angry human, they were more likely to show behaviors revealing distress such as flattening their ears and lowering their bodies. Remember, these were static images of stranger’s faces and brief audio recordings. There were no emotional clues coming from how someone’s body moved, or what the person was doing. Yet the cats responded to the emotional valence.
Photo by Bohdan Komarivskyi on Unsplash
The researchers also asked whether the cats could distinguish between emotions in other cats, testing out purring and hissing vocalizations with images of calm and angry cats. Given that the cats could recognize differences in the human emotions, it probably comes as no surprise that they could do so for other cats as well.
So yes, your cat probably recognizes how you are feeling sometimes. And this study might even make you feel a little more connected to them, in turn.
Curious to hear your reactions, thoughts and ideas — feel free to leave a comment below!
Learn more about the researchers
Angelo Quaranta, Serenella d’Ingeo, Rosaria Amoruso & Marcello Siniscalchi
All from the University of Bari “Aldo Moro,” Bari, Italy
Article
Quaranta, A., d’Ingeo, S., Amoruso, R., & Siniscalchi, M. (2020). Emotion recognition in cats. Animals, 10(7), 1107. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/10/7/1107
