Do Cats Have A Sixth Sense For Our Human Emotions?
Have you ever felt like your cat knows exactly how you’re feeling, even without saying a word?
As cat owners, we often observe our furry friends displaying an uncanny ability to sense our emotions and react accordingly.
But is it just a coincidence or can cats really sense our human emotions?
How Do Cats Sense Human Emotions?
Let’s be honest. Some cats do not seem to care all that much if their owners are happy or sad.
I’ve lived with a few of those!
But other cats seem to have the most amazing ability to sense how their person is feeling.
Many a cat owner will have a story or two to tell about how their feline friend saved them in their time of need.
In fact, cats are very sensitive to subtle changes in their environment and frequently pick up on our body language, vocal cues, and even facial expressions.
This information helps them interpret our behavior to figure out what we might be feeling.
Let’s look at some examples.
Sensing Emotions Through Body Language
When humans experience emotional distress, they often exhibit physical changes and signs of sadness, such as crying, appearing withdrawn, or a general loss of interest.
Cats are observant creatures and can pick up on these changes in body postures, which may cause them to adjust their behavior accordingly.
For instance, your cat may come and sit with you when you are sad, run off and hide away when you are angry, or follow you around if she senses something is wrong.
Sensing Emotions Through Chemical Cues
Cats have an acute sense of smell and scent is an integral part of how they experience the world.
It is also essential to the way they communicate.
While we don’t yet know for sure whether cats can detect any subtle chemical change in human scent that accompanies stress, we cannot rule it out either.
Research already shows that dogs can detect their owner’s stress levels through their sense of smell, so why not cats too?
Sensing Emotions Through Vocal Cues
Our tone of voice gives away a lot about how we are feeling.
When we’re happy, we tend to speak in a higher pitch with a smiling face.
When we’re sad or upset, our voices may be lower.
Cats can pick up on these subtle changes in our vocal cues and may adjust their behavior accordingly.
Sensing Emotions Through Physical Contact
Cats often rub against their owners or snuggle up on their laps as a sign of affection.
However, when we’re feeling depressed, anxious, or upset, our body language changes accordingly, perhaps becoming more rigid or downbeat.
We may also experience a lower heart rate or a decrease in body temperature when we’re in a sad state.
Cats may be able to pick up on this through physical contact.
Sensing Emotions Through Environmental Cues
Cats are extremely sensitive to change.
Ask anyone who has ever moved house with a cat or even dared to change the furniture around!
So when there are changes in our daily routine, our feline companions can get a sense of our emotions because of differences in their usual environment.
For example, if we’re feeling angry, stressed, or anxious, our behavior will probably change.
We may become more agitated and stomp around a bit, shout at someone, or slam the door if we’re having a bad day.
Many cats will pick up on this and become more agitated themselves, a process known as emotional contagion.
What Is Emotional Contagion?
Emotional contagion refers to the process of mimicking or “catching” the emotions of another individual, often without conscious awareness.
Emotional contagion can occur through nonverbal cues, such as facial expressions and body language, as well as through verbal communication and tone of voice.
This can lead to the emotional state of a pair or group of individuals becoming synchronized, resulting in a shared mood or feeling.
This applies to both positive and negative emotions.
The Science Behind Cats’ Emotional Intelligence
While we still don’t fully understand the extent of our cats’ ability to sense our emotions, there is a growing body of empirical evidence to suggest they can comprehend our feelings – to some extent at least.
Cats Look To Their Owners For Guidance
In one study, researchers observed cats as their owners reacted to an unfamiliar object.
The cats were split into two groups, with one group watching their owners display a positive emotion towards the object, while the other group saw a negative reaction in the human facial expressions.
Remarkably, 79% of the cats looked to their owners for guidance and adjusted their behavior based on the emotional cues they received from the human faces (Merola et al., 2015).
This finding suggests that cats are not only sensitive to their owner’s emotions but can also use them to make decisions and adjust their behavior accordingly.
Cats Can Recognize Emotional Gestures
In another study, researchers found that cats are capable of sensing and responding to the emotions of both humans and other cats.
They discovered that our feline friends can understand whether an emotion is positive or negative and adjust their behavior accordingly.
For example, if a cat senses a positive emotion in a human or another cat, she may approach them with affection or playfulness.
Conversely, if she perceives a negative emotion, she may withdraw or become defensive.
This ability to detect and respond to emotions helps cats to navigate their environment and form relationships with other animals and humans, and can help strengthen the human-cat bond (Quaranta et al., 2020).
Cats Can Recognize Their Owner’s Voice
New research has found that cats can recognize their owners’ voices, the tone of the voice, and whether their owner is talking to them or not.
The way humans talk to their pets is often similar to how they talk to young children – I’m sure I’m not the only one who talks to their cats as if they were small toddlers!
So scientists tested 16 cats and found that they could tell the difference between when their owner was speaking to them directly, and when the owner was speaking to other adults.
But it only worked when it was the owner doing the talking.
When any other random person spoke, cats couldn’t tell the difference.
These findings suggest that cats and humans can develop a special way of communicating with each other based on their mutual experiences.
Not just that, but that cats can form strong bonds with their owners (De Mouzon, et al., 2023).
You probably already knew that last part from experience alone, but now there is research to back it up!
Cat Owners’ Behavior Influences Their Cats’ Personalities
Scientists have also studied how an owner’s personality can affect their cat’s behavior.
Research shows that cat owners who are more nervous or worried (labeled “neurotic” in the study) are more likely to say that their cats had “bad” behavior.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, their cats were more likely to be anxious, scared, and aggressive.
But if the pet owners were responsible and organized (labeled “conscientious”), their cats were more likely to be well-behaved and not anxious or aggressive.
Overall, recent research indicates that cats have developed social skills that allow them to understand human emotional signals.
This is a key factor for the maintenance of interspecies relationships and for strengthening the human-cat bond.
Can Cats Have Empathy?
Empathy is the concept of being able to understand and feel what someone else is going through from their point of view.
Although we now know that cats can sense their owners’ emotions to some degree, there is still much research to be done on whether they can go the extra mile and feel empathy.
But here are some possibilities:
Affiliative Behavior and Social Skills
As we have seen, when a cat senses that her owner is sad, she may change her behavior, including becoming more attentive, trailing around after you, or spending more time hanging out with you.
She may also show affiliative (“friendly”) behavior by purring, rubbing against you, or seeking physical contact.
Emotional Contagion and Feline Empathy
Cats can also experience emotional contagion and, again, become more attentive, trail around after you, or spend more time hanging out with you.
Even small gestures, such as soft eye contact and a slow blink or a friendly headbutt, can help create a close bond and trust between cats and their human companions, giving you the distinct sense that your furry friend cares how you feel.
Speaking from experience, I can confirm that any such gesture can help relieve stress and anxiety, and be an enormous mood booster.
The Emotional Connection Between Cats and Humans
The bond between cats and their owners is a two-way street.
We have already seen that pet parents’ personality traits can have a significant impact on their cats’ physical and mental health, happiness, behavior, and the strength of their bond.
Owners who are more relaxed and open, and who provide structured care while also allowing autonomy, tend to have healthier cats, with their more relaxed behavior being reflected in the cat’s emotions and personality.
Before You Go
So what do you think? Has your cat ever helped you get through a crisis or provided a source of comfort in your darkest hour?
It’s clear that cats have a special way of connecting with humans, and science is now proving it.
It’s just one more reason to love our kitties even more!
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Resources
- Discrimination of cat-directed speech from human-directed speech in a population of indoor companion cats (Felis catus) – Charlotte de Mouzon, Marine Gonthier, & Gérard Leboucher
- Dogs can discriminate between human baseline and psychological stress condition odours – Clara Wilson, Kerry Campbell, Zachary Petzel, and Catherine Reeve
- Emotion Recognition in Cats – Angelo Quaranta, Serenella d’Ingeo, Rosaria Amoruso, and Marcello Siniscalchi
- Owner personality and the wellbeing of their cats share parallels with the parent-child relationship – Lauren R. Finka, Joanna Ward, Mark J. Farnworth, & Daniel S. Mills
- Social referencing and cat–human communication – I. Merola, M. Lazzaroni, S. Marshall-Pescini, and E. Prato-Previde
