Can cats be man’s other best friend?

A study on domestic cats (F. silvestris catus) and their discrimination of human emotion cue.

Although dogs are traditionally seen as “man’s best friend”, have you ever wondered why there still exists a subset of the population that prefer having a pet cat over having a dog? Cats are typically characterized as aloof because of their independent nature despite some breeds of cat being more sociable than others. Nevertheless, cats are capable of developing strong bonds with their owners and might also be able to pick up on their humans’ emotional cues just like dogs are able to. The ability of domestic dogs to follow and attend to human emotion expressions is well documented but it still remains unknown if domestic cats possess similar abilities. Which, if you think about it makes sense because dogs were evolved to live in complex social groups because in the wild, they hunt together as a pack whereas, cats live solitary lives and hunt on their own. The focus of this study done by the researchers Galvan and Vonk was to determine if cats are able to discriminate human emotion cues.

The researchers conducted two experiments to determine the extent to which domestic cats discriminate between human emotion cues. The first experiment presented cats with facial and postural cues of happiness and anger from both an unfamiliar experimenter and their familiar owner in the absence of vocal cues. This experiment was done to determine whether cats would behave differently in response to two basic human emotion expressions without the use of verbal or dynamic movement cues. The two human expressions simulated for the cats were happiness (positive) and anger (negative). Twelve sterilized adult cats from five different households were placed in a room in their house where they spent the majority of their time. They completed two individual trials per day across four test days, where there were four test conditions familiar happy, unfamiliar happy, familiar angry, and unfamiliar angry done by their owner and the experimenter. Then the cat’s behavioral response was analyzed after. Some of the cat’s positive behaviors included having ears forward and normal, relaxed body posture whereas slinking, tense body posture and a tightly tucked tail were considered negative behaviors. The results of the first experiment showed that the cats did not appear to alter their approach to their owner based on the emotion condition. However, they did alter their overall behavior by responding more positively to their owner in the happy condition. This means that the cat engaged more with the owner when the owner displayed positive emotions. The second experiment presented cats with vocal cues of human emotion through a positively or negatively charged conversation between an experimenter and owner. Vocal cues were selected given cats’ sensitivity to auditory information. Twenty-six sterilized cats were tested in a lab, and for two minutes were exposed to either angry vocalizations of their owner such as yelling, or a positive vocalization signaled by a calm tone and no sudden movements. The cats’ latency to exit their carrier and their proximity to their owner or the experimenter was used to judge its’s response. The result of this experiment indicated that cats do not adjust their proximity or willingness to engage based upon emotion condition.

The results demonstrated that the domestic cats were only modestly sensitive to emotion, particularly when displayed by their owner, suggesting that a history of human interaction alone may not be sufficient to shape such abilities in domestic cats. The broader impact of this study also shows that we cannot experiment on dogs and cats in the same way because cats might respond differently to human emotion cues. More research still needs to be done to determine if cats use alternative cues to predict differences in human behavior. Bottom-line, cats can be man’s other best friend.

Reference: Galvan, M., & Vonk, J. (2016). Man’s other best friend: domestic cats (F. silvestriscatus) and their discrimination of human emotion cues. Animal Cognition, 19(1), 193–205. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=eoah&AN=36866363&site=pfi-live&custid=asc1