Research confirms a simple trick to communicating with your cat

Cats have a reputation for aloofness (and flooffiness), but if you and your feline friend don’t bond, you may simply not speak their language.

Don’t fear – 2020 research shows it’s not that difficult. You just have to smile at them more often. Not the human way, by showing your teeth, but the cat way, by squinting your eyes and blinking slowly.

By observing cat-human interactions, scientists confirmed that this expression causes cats – both familiar and strange – to approach and be more receptive to humans.

“As someone who has studied animal behavior and is a cat owner, it’s great to be able to show that cats and people can communicate in this way,” Karen McComb, a psychologist at the University of Sussex, said in a 2020 statement.

“It’s something that many cat owners already suspected, so it’s exciting to have found evidence for it.”

If you’ve ever been around cats, you’ve probably seen their “partially closed eyes” facial expressions accompanied by slow blinking. It is similar to how human eyes narrow when smiling and usually occurs when the cat is relaxed and content. The expression is interpreted as a kind of cat smile.

Anecdotal evidence from cat owners has hinted that humans may copy this phrase to communicate to cats that we are friendly and open to interaction. So a team of psychologists designed two experiments to determine whether cats behaved differently toward slow-blinking humans.

In the first experiment, owners blinked slowly at 21 cats from 14 different households. Once the cat became comfortable in one spot in the home environment, owners were instructed to sit about 3 feet away and blink slowly when the cat looked at them. Cameras recorded the faces of both the owner and the cat, and the results were compared to how cats blink without human interaction.

The results showed that cats were more likely to blink slowly at their humans after their humans blinked slowly at them, compared to the no-interaction condition.

The second experiment involved 24 cats from eight different households. This time it wasn’t the owners who blinked, but the researchers, who had had no previous contact with the cat. As a control, cats were recorded responding to a no-blink condition, in which people stared at the cats without blinking.

The researchers performed the same slow blinking process as the first experiment, adding an outstretched hand toward the cat. And they found that the cats not only blinked back more often, but also approached the human’s hand more often after the human had blinked.

“This study is the first to experimentally investigate the role of slow blinking in cat-human communication,” said McComb.

“And it’s something you can try with your own cat at home or with cats you meet on the street. It’s a great way to strengthen the bond you have with cats. Try narrowing your eyes at them as you would do with a relaxed smile, followed by closing your eyes for a few seconds. You will notice that they themselves respond in kind, and you can start some kind of conversation.

Dogs may be much more enthusiastic and demonstrative than cats, but this news comes as no surprise to cat lovers. Research in recent years has shown that our feline friends are much more in tune with their human housemates than previously thought and that comparing them to dogs is a disservice.

For example, cats respond similarly to people who are receptive to them – so if you find cats aloof, that may be a problem for you, not the cat. Similarly, cats reflect the personality traits of the people they live with – this may be related to why cats seem to pick up on when their humans are sad. They can also recognize their name (although they often choose to ignore it). And their bonds with their people are surprisingly deep.

It is difficult to understand why cats slowly blink at people in this way. It is interpreted as a means of signaling benign intentions, as cats are thought to interpret continuous staring as threatening. But it’s also possible that cats developed the expression because humans respond positively to it. This is often impossible to say with domesticated animals.

Either way, it seems to help build a bond. And that’s good to know. Learning how to improve our relationships with these enigmatic animals could also be a way to improve their emotional health – not just in the home environment, but in a range of potentially stressful situations.

“Understanding positive ways in which cats and people interact can increase public understanding of cats, improve feline welfare and tell us more about the social-cognitive abilities of this under-studied species,” says psychologist Tasmin Humphrey of the University of Sussex.

“Our findings could potentially be used to assess the welfare of cats in different environments, including veterinary practices and shelters.”

You’re going to try it right now, aren’t you?

The research was published in Scientific reports.

An earlier version of this article appeared in October 2020.

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