Cats communicate their hostile or friendly intentions using 276 facial expressions, which have probably evolved over more than 10,000 years of coexistence with humans. Two researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles counted them by analyzing videos recorded in a CatCafe, a place where patrons have the opportunity to interact (and even do yoga) with dozens of felines.
The study, published in the journal Behavioural Processes, is the brainchild of Lauren Scott, a medical student who for an entire academic year filmed the facial expressions that Catcafé cats addressed to their peers in the absence of humans when the café was closed. The experiment produced 194 minutes of video recordings, which the researcher then examined with the help of evolutionary psychologist Brittany Florkiewicz trying to encode all the movements of the felines' facial muscles, excluding those related to breathing, chewing, yawning and other similar actions.
It turned out that cats have 276 different facial expressions, many more than previously assumed (considering that extremely social animals such as chimpanzees have 357). Each expression combines about four of the 26 unique facial movements that cats are capable of, such as pursed lips, lowered jaw, dilated or constricted pupils, blinks, nose licking, protracted or retracted whiskers, and various ear positions. In comparison, humans have 44 unique facial movements, while dogs have 27.
The vast majority of cat expressions filmed during the study were clearly friendly (45%) or aggressive (37%), while the remaining 18% were ambiguous. The meaning of feline expressions is not entirely clear, but cats usually tend to move their ears and whiskers towards another cat during friendly interactions and push them away in hostile interactions. Constricted pupils and lip licking also characterize encounters between rivals.
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