Cats have a reputation for being aloof (and loitering), but if you and your feline friend aren’t bonding, maybe you just don’t speak their language.
Fear not – 2020 research has shown it’s not that hard. You just need to smile at them more. Not the human way, showing its teeth, but the cat way, squinting and blinking slowly.
By observing cat-human interactions, scientists have confirmed that this expression makes cats – both familiar and strange – approach and are more receptive to humans.
“As someone who has both studied animal behavior and been 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 had already suspected, so it’s exciting to have found evidence.”
If you’ve spent time with cats, you’ve probably seen their “partially closed eyes” facial expressions, accompanied by slow blinks. It’s 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 cat smile.
Anecdotal evidence from cat owners has suggested that humans may copy this phrase to communicate to cats who we are. friendly and open to interaction. So a team of psychologists designed two experiments to determine if cats behaved differently toward slow-blinking humans.
In the first experiment, owners slowly blinked 21 cats from 14 different homes. Once the cat was settled and comfortable in a place in its home environment, owners should sit about 1 meter away and blink slowly when the cat looked at them. The cameras recorded both the owner’s and the cat’s faces, 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 their humans blink slowly at them, compared to the no-interaction condition.
The second experiment included 24 cats from eight different households. This time it was not the owners who blinked but the researchers, who had had no prior contact with the cat. For a control, cats were recorded in response to a no-blink condition, in which humans looked at cats without blinking.
The researchers performed the same slow blinking process as in the first experiment, adding an outstretched hand towards 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 meet on the street. It’s a great way to strengthen the bond you have with cats. Try look at them like you would with a relaxed smile, followed by closing your eyes for a few seconds, you’ll find that they respond the same way themselves, and you can strike up some sort of conversation.
Dogs may be a lot more demonstrative with enthusiasm than cats, but this news comes as no surprise to cat lovers. Research over the past few years has shown that our feline friends are much more in tune with their human roommates than previously assumed and that comparing them to dogs is a disservice.
Cats, for example, respond in kind to humans who are receptive to them – so if you find distant cats, it could be a problem with you, not the cat. Likewise, cats echo the personality traits of the humans they live with – this may be related to why cats seem to pick up when their humans are sad. They can also recognize their name (although they choose to ignore them most of the time). And their the bonds with their humans are surprisingly deep.
It’s hard to know why cats slowly blink at humans this way. It was interpreted as a way to signal benign intentions as cats are thought to interpret the uninterrupted gaze as a threat. But it’s also possible that cats developed the expression since humans respond positively to it. With pets, it’s often impossible to tell.
Either way, it seems to help forge a rapport. And that’s a good thing to know. Learning to improve our relationships with these enigmatic animals could also be a way to improve their emotional health, not only in the home environment, but in a whole range of potentially stressful situations.
“Understanding the positive ways in which 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 understudied species,” said University of Sussex psychologist Tasmin Humphrey.
“Our results 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 away, aren’t you?
The research has been published in Scientific reports.
A version of this article was first published in October 2020.