Oriented on making people closer

The study shows an amazing social depth that can be associated with co-evolution with humans.

...A gray cat looks at a red tabby cat, squinting and pressing her ears. The tabby cat in response wrinkles his nose and throws back his mustache. If glances and growls do not resolve the quarrel that has arisen, the claws will come out, and the fur will stand on end and a fight will occur.

Of course, these expressions of faces are not the only ones that cats build to each other. In a study published this month in the journal Behavioral Processes, researchers counted 276 different cat "facial" expressions used to convey hostile and friendly intentions, as well as everything in between. Moreover, as the team found out, our feline friends may have developed this range of taunts, smiles and grimaces during a 10,000-year history next to humans.

"Many people still mistakenly consider cats to be a largely antisocial species," says Daniel Mills, a veterinary behaviorist at the University of Lincoln. He was not involved in the study, but says his results prove otherwise. "There's obviously a lot going on that we don't know about."

Cats can be solitary individuals, but they often make friends with other kittens in people's homes or on the street; wild cats can live in thousands of colonies, sometimes capturing entire islands.

Lauren Scott, a medical student and avid feline from the University of Kansas, has long wondered how all these cats communicate with each other. There should be

love and diplomacy, not just fighting, but most studies of feline manifestations focus on aggression.

In 2021, Scott studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, just minutes from the CatCafé Lounge. There, human visitors can chat- and even do yoga — with dozens of cats that can be "adopted." From August to June, Lauren's video recorded 194 minutes of cat facial expressions, especially those directed at other cats, after the cafe closed for the day. Then she and evolutionary psychologist Brittany Florkiewicz, also working at the University of California at Los Angeles at the time, encoded all facial muscle movements, excluding any associated with breathing, chewing, yawning and the like.

They found a total of 276 different facial expressions in relation to other cats — this is not so far from the 357 produced by chimpanzees, says Florkiewicz, and much more than many thought cats were capable of. Each expression combined about four of the 26 unique facial movements, including parted lips, lowered jaw, dilated or narrowed pupils, blinking and half-blinking, elongated corners of the lips, nose licking, elongated or retracted mustache and/or different positions of the ears. For comparison, humans have 44 unique facial movements, dogs have 27.

In the current study, the duo found that the vast majority of cat expressions were either overtly friendly (45%) or overtly aggressive (37%). The remaining 18% were — like the smile of the Cheshire Cat — so ambiguous that they fell into both categories.

What exactly the cats "said" to each other with these expressions remains unclear. But in general, cats tend to bring their ears and whiskers closer to another cat during a friendly interaction and take them away during an unfriendly interaction. Constricted pupils and lip-licking also often accompany hostile encounters.

Interestingly, some friendly expressions of cats resemble the expressions of people, dogs, monkeys and other animals. Although the researchers were not able to

compare their results with those of wild cats, they know that all close relatives of a domestic cat are cruel lonely animals. Domestic cats may have retained some of their protective communication, but probably began to acquire friendly facial expressions in anticipation of leftovers from humans.

It remains to be determined whether dogs understand the meaning of feline facial expressions.

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