For years, we believed that cats, unlike dogs, do not express emotions through facial expressions. Now it turns out we were wrong: a new study conducted in the United States and published this month in the journal Behaviorial Processes revealed a broad repertoire of facial expressions through which cats communicate their moods and emotions. We used ChatGPT to reach our conclusions.
Over the course of a year, researchers captured 276 clear facial expressions among the 50 cats living at a particular cat café in Los Angeles. These phrases ranged from playful and friendly to aggressive. That's a significantly higher number of facial expressions than we and our best friends have—humans have 44 facial expressions, and dogs have 27, according to studies. The number reached by the cats is closer to the impressive number that chimpanzees are equipped with – 357.
Study author Brittany Florkiewicz, a teaching assistant in psychology at Lyon College in Arkansas, highlighted this gap in knowledge and explained that many previous studies on cats have focused on their relationship with humans over thousands of years of domestication, leaving a void in our understanding of how cats communicate. Each of the expressions revealed involved a combination of about four of the 26 different facial movements, including spread lips, dilated or constricted pupils, blinking, twisting of the corners of the mouth, nasal licking, and different ear postures.
In one observation, the researchers noticed a change from friendly behavior to confrontation between two cats. The rapid transition was accompanied by obvious changes in their facial expressions. At first, one cat's behavior showed calm, with ears and mustache tilted forward, but as the interaction escalated, the ears and mustache moved backward, signaling a change in mood.
The study concluded that most cats' facial expressions (45%) were friendly, and fewer were aggressive (37%). Some expressions (18%) were considered unclear or belonged to both categories.
Interestingly, the researchers found that certain facial expressions, such as "common play faces," with mouths pulled back and jaws dropped in a kind of laughter, are shared between different animals—that is, the play expressions of cats, dogs, humans, and monkeys share similar characteristics.
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