Scientists have confirmed that there is a way to communicate with your cats
And make them see you more friendly
Compared to dogs in particular, cats have a reputation for being more independent and aloof, with training them a decidedly more difficult undertaking. In fact, even though they have been living in the human environment for at least 9,500 years, there are many who believe that their behavior is due to the fact that we simply…don’t speak their language!
Exactly this is supported by a scientific study that showed that all one has to do to make their cat bond more with them is to smile at it. Just not in the human way, but in the feline way, that is by narrowing his eyes and slowly opening and closing them!
Going into details, a scientific team from the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, studied cat-human interactions and was able to confirm that this act of slowly opening and closing the eyes makes cats approach and be more receptive to people. In fact, this applies both to the cases when the cats are familiar with someone, such as their owner for example, but also in the case that it is a complete stranger.
The experiment of the scientific team
The team of psychologists designed two experiments to see if cats actually behave differently towards people who blink their eyes slowly.
In the first experiment, owners slowly blinked their eyes at 21 cats from 14 different households. Specifically, after the cat had settled into a spot in its home environment, the owners had to sit about a meter away from it and slowly blink their eyes when the cat looked at them.
The cameras recorded both the owner’s face and the cat’s face, and the results were compared to how cats blink when there is no human interaction. The results did show that cats are more likely to slow-blink their eyes in humans when they see this behavior.
The second experiment involved 24 cats from eight different households. This time, it wasn’t the owners who blinked, but the researchers, who had no previous contact with each cat. Cats were initially recorded as responding to a condition without eyeblinking. That is, when the strangers just looked at them, without blinking their eyes.
The researchers then performed the same procedure as in the first experiment, but this time they brought their hand closer to each cat. They found that cats were not only more likely to blink, but were also more likely to approach the human’s hand if the human blinked slowly.
The conclusion
If you are a cat owner or if you have spent some time with them, you will surely have seen their “partially closed” eyes expression. Something similar seems to be happening with people’s eyes similarly narrowing when someone smiles. This behavior is usually observed when the kitten is relaxed and happy and is interpreted as a kind of “cat smile”.
Of course, this is just an interpretation. It’s hard to know why cats actually do this. It is more likely that they signal benevolent intentions, as it is believed that they interpret the incessant staring as a threat.
So, according to the study, all you have to do to make a cat look at you more friendly, is not to stare at it, but to slowly open and close its eyes!
The research has an official title ‘The role of cat eye narrowing movements in cat–human communication’ and was published in the scientific journal Scientific Reports.
You can find it by clicking here
