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Once More, with Feeling Andrea Carne discusses new research that reveals how cats react to negative human emotional states
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friend gave me a coffee cup some time ago which reads, “Cats know how you feel…they don’t care, but they know.” Well, recent research reveals that such comical turns of phrase are untrue. Not only can cats perceive our emotional state, but they will react ac cordingly through their own stress levels. Before getting into the nitty gritty of research findings, however, let’s begin by looking in general at cats and emotion. I mean, despite what some choose to believe (including, perhaps, the creator of my cof fee cup’s slogan), but what many cat guardians already know: cats do have feelings. Of course they do!
Emotional Systems Observation of cats across a multitude of research studies shows they frequently monitor their environment, evaluating what’s around them and adjusting their responses to suit. Those responses are influenced by their emotional systems. If we take the definition of an emotion as “a strong feeling deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others” (Lexico, 2020), there’s no way we can deny that cats have emotional responses to situations and therefore experience emotions – or feelings – as driv ers of that response. That’s not to say feline emotions are the same as those of humans. Cat emotions are generally grouped into positive or negative. On the positive side, we know they feel things like pleasure, comfort, relax ation, lust, and playfulness. On the negative side, we know they feel things like fear, anxiety, frustration, panic, pain, and grief. And we also know they can feel more than one emotion at once – for example, they may be feeling pain, but also frustration that the pain is stopping them from achieving something, such as scratching an itch. So, yes, cats have emotions. But do we know if they can interpret the emotions of others, specifically humans?
Higher Understanding This is where the recent research comes in. Previous studies, including the 2016 project by Galvan and Vonk, have already shown us that cats are sensitive to the emotions of humans (particularly their owners). But now, thanks to a group of Italian researchers at the University of Bari, led by Angelo Quaranta, we know even more. The group’s paper con cludes that our feline friends not only recognize certain human emo tions, but also respond via their own stress levels, pointing to a higher level of emotional understanding and reaction than was previously real ized. In short, the study by Quaranta et al. (2020) looked at how cats per ceived acoustic and visual signals from humans and other cats, and their ability to match those signals with the corresponding emotions. The cats involved with the study were presented with visual pictures of cats and humans showing negative and positive emotional states, as
...cats displayed more stress-related behavior when exposed to the negative emotional stimuli (the cat hiss and the human anger) than to all other stimuli.
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BARKS from the Guild/November 2020
© Can Stock Photo / barsik
A study has found that cats will react to human emotional states through their own stress levels
well as corresponding audio for the emotions pictured (for the cats, a hiss and a purr; for the humans, a laugh and a growl). The cats’ preference to look at different emotional stimuli and their subsequent display of behaviors related to stress/anxiety were observed and recorded. The results showed the cats displayed more stressrelated behavior when exposed to the negative emotional stimuli (the cat hiss and the human anger) than to all other stimuli. This would support the theory that cats become stressed or anxious when exposed to negative emotions: “Our results demonstrate that cats integrate visual and auditory signals to recognize human and conspecific [same species] emotions and they appear to modulate their behavior according to the valence of the emotion perceived.” (Quaranta et al., 2020).
Interspecific Communication But the study goes further than that, particularly with regards to cats and their relationships with humans. Unlike previous studies (including Pongracz et al., 2018), the Italian project supports a new train of thought regarding cats’ generalization of interpreting human emotions. In other words, cats seemingly have the ability to perceive and act upon the emotional states of all humans, not just those they are familiar with. This conclusion was drawn from the fact that the cats in the University of Bari study were responding to pictures and audio of humans not known to them. “We found that cats are able to recognize and interpret unfamiliar human emotional signals, suggesting that they have a general mental representation of humans and their emotions. This cognitive represen
