Unique News: Cats have about 300 expressions on their faces.

It is believed that cats are not social animals. But a recent study found 276 facial expressions in cats ranging from friendliness to anger. According to a study published in Behavioral Processes, 10,000 years of human companionship has contributed to the development of these emotions in cats.

Cats may be solitary and solitary creatures, but they are often seen playing with other cats in homes or on the street. Some wild cats live in large colonies whose population is in thousands.

Most studies on cats have focused on fights between them, but cat lover Lauren Scott thought that cats may have other emotions besides aggression, such as love and diplomacy. She wanted to know how cats communicate with each other.

So, Scott turned to a catcafe. They recorded videos of the cats’ facial expressions after the café closed; Especially when cats were associating with other cats in some way. Then they teamed up with developmental psychologist Brittany Florkiewicz to code all of the cats’ facial muscle movements. In coding, he left out breathing, chewing, yawning and other such movements.

In this way they recognized a total of 276 different facial expressions presented by cats. The highest number of facial expressions (357) so far have been seen in chimpanzees. Each expression the cats observed was a combination of four of the 26 unique facial expressions observed: open lips, wide or spread jaws, dilated or constricted pupils, full or half-lidded eyelids, raised lip corners (such as slow smiling), nose licking, stretched or retracted mustaches, and/or various ear positions. For comparison, humans have 44 such unique facial expressions, and dogs have 27. However, studies are ongoing to find out how many different movements we use together to express emotions.

The researchers also found that most of the cats’ expressions were apparently either friendly (45 percent) or aggressive (37 percent). The remaining 18 percent were so vague that they could fall into both categories.

It is still not entirely clear what the cats were actually ‘saying’ to each other through these gestures. What is certainly understood is that during friendly communication, cats move their ears and whiskers towards the other cat, and during unfriendly communication, they move them away from them. Shrinked pupils and licking the lips are also signs of competition.

Interestingly, cats have some of the same friendly gestures as humans, dogs, monkeys, and other animals. This indicates that these species may be sharing ‘a common emotional face’.

However, the researchers were not able to compare their results with other members of the wild cat family, but they do know that all of the domestic cat’s close relatives are aggressive loners. Therefore, the hypothesis is that domestic cats have retained some of this aggressive behavior, but have introduced friendly expressions while waiting for human leftovers.