Cats ‘have 276 facial expressions’ — here’s how to decipher their mood. Scientists suggest they may have evolved as a result of living with humans.
“Please would you tell me,” asks the heroine of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “why your cat grins like that?”
Alice is both surprised and somewhat sceptical when told by the Duchess that all Cheshire cats can grin and that “most of ‘em do”.
We can only wonder, then, what she would make of a new study that claims that our feline pets actually have nearly 300 facial expressions — a repertoire far larger than many experts had anticipated and which may have evolved as a result of them living alongside humans.
The study involved dozens of cats being filmed at the CatCafe Lounge in Los Angeles, a non-profit organisation where homeless felines live communally while being put up for adoption. The footage was analysed, with the researchers looking at how the animals interacted with each other.
More specifically, they logged each occurrence of 26 facial muscle movements, including blinks and half blinks, nose licks, nose wrinkles, whisker retractions, lip licks and various ear positions.
They identified 276 different combinations of those movements, each of which they argue represents a feline facial expression.
That was not far away from the 357 expressions a similar study had previously seen in chimpanzees, and it easily beat the 80 recognised in the past in gibbons.
Meanwhile, dogs are said to be capable of 27 facial movements. But nobody seems to have looked at how many expressions result when they combine them.
According to Dr Brittany Florkiewicz of Lyon College in Arkansas, a co-author of the study, the sheer number of cat facial expressions was a surprise and indicates a hidden depth to how felines express themselves. “The main takeaway is that cat communication is more complex than we previously thought,” she said.
“But thanks to the development of Facial Action Coding Systems [where individual muscle movements are tracked], we are now able to uncover communicative complexity among mammals that may have been previously overlooked.”
The researchers – Lauren Scott and Florkiewicz, who were both at the University of California, Los Angeles, when they gathered their data – were not able to ascribe a nuanced meaning to every cat expression. But about 45 per cent of them were clearly friendly. These tended to involve eyes being closed and ears and whiskers being tilted forwards, towards another cat during an amicable encounter.
Another 37 per cent were obviously aggressive or defensive. Ears and whiskers were drawn back, away from a potential enemy. Other movements often seen in aggressive or fearful expressions included constricted pupils and a licking of the lips.
The remaining 18 per cent of the expressions were ambiguous, not unlike the Cheshire Cat’s grin.
Scott and Florkiewicz believe that their findings, published in the journal Behavioural Processes, challenge the notion that domestic cats are uncommunicative. Close relatives, such as African wildcats, are solitary animals that mostly avoid both people and other wildcats.
The researchers suggest that pet cats have developed a greater range of facial expressions than their wild cousins as a result of living with humans. They argue that being close to people often also means living in close quarters with other cats, and being able to communicate with these other felines helps to avoid conflict.
They would not be the only pets to alter how they communicate to adapt to life with us. The most striking example is probably seen in domesticated dogs, which have evolved new muscles around the eyes that are not seen in the wolves from which they descended.
In 2019, researchers from the University of Portsmouth suggested that by being able to raise their eyebrows, dogs were able to trigger a nurturing response in humans. This “puppy dog” expression made their eyes appear larger and more infant-like and made us more likely to spoil them, they said.
The cat study focused on expressions that signalled friendliness or hostility between felines, but Florkiewicz believes it should be possible to decipher more nuanced messages. “In the future, we plan to study how cats produce facial signals during specific interactions, such as play, grooming, fighting, and so on,” she said.
How pets interact with their owners is also of interest. “Our current study focused on intraspecific (cat-cat) interactions. However, it is plausible that cats also use a wide variety of facial signals to communicate with humans, given their facial mobility,” she said.