Hiss & Tell: Cat Behavior and Beyond

Unlocking Feline Communication: Exploring Cat Facial Expressions with Dr Brittany Florkiewicz

• Kristiina Wilson • Season 2 • Episode 21

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Unlock the mysteries of the feline world as we host Dr Brittany Florkiewicz, a renowned comparative and evolutionary psychologist who dares to challenge the conventional wisdom surrounding cat communication. Ever wondered if your cat can express more than just hunger or disdain? Our latest episode promises to shift your perception by uncovering the rich tapestry of cat facial expressions, revealing over 200 distinct types that go unnoticed by most of us. Brittany's groundbreaking research, initially sparked by a collaboration with her student Lauren Scott, delves into the subtleties of cat expressions, inviting us to rethink how we interpret our feline friends' gestures.

Join us on a virtual journey to a cat café, where the behavior of over fifty cats has been scrutinized using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), a tool traditionally reserved for human expressions. This cat café study is a testament to the complexity and sophistication of cat communication, challenging the long-held belief that cats lack the expressive range seen in other animals. From playful whisker twitches to the comforting squint of their eyes, we explore how these cues can enhance our understanding of cats' social interactions, adding depth to the way we bond with them at home.

Explore the implications of these findings for pet owners and animal behaviorists alike. With Brittany's insights, we discuss the creation of a comprehensive cat facial expression dictionary, a resource that promises to transform daily interactions with our feline companions. Whether you're a seasoned cat owner or simply curious about the enigmatic world of cats, this episode is packed with revelations that will change how you perceive and interact with these fascinating creatures. Don't miss out on the chance to become fluent in the language of cats!

Kristiina Wilson:

Hi and welcome to Hiss and Tell a Cat Behavior and More podcast hosted by me, K Wilson, animal behaviorist. Today I'm speaking with comparative and evolutionary psychologist, brittany Florkowitz. She is the co-author of Feline Faces Unraveling the Social Function of Domestic Cat Facial Signals. We are going to talk about her study, how she did it and its implications for you and your cat. So let's get started. Hi and welcome to another episode of Hiss and Tell. I am your host, christina Wilson, and with me today is comparative and evolutionary psychologist, brittany Florkowitz. Welcome, Brittany. Thank you for having me. Thanks for being here. So Brittany has done a really amazing study about facial expressions in felines. But first, before we get into the nitty gritty about that, can you tell me a little bit about your education and your history working with animals?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yeah, absolutely so. I'm a comparative and evolutionary psychologist and most of my work is focused around drawing comparisons between the behavior of humans to other animals to learn more about what makes us unique and what makes us similar to other animals when it comes more specifically to communication. I have a bachelor's, master's and PhD in anthropology interestingly enough, because one of the types of animals I work with a lot are non-human primates.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So I work a lot with chimpanzees, with gibbons, orangutans, gorillas. I work with white-faced sake monkeys now, which are fun. So most of my research is typically with primates. So I got my degrees in anthropology, because biological anthropology includes the study of non with primates. So I got my degrees in anthropology because biological anthropology includes the study of non-human primates. And because we're primates. It kind of feeds into that comparative aspect. But of course I've kind of expanded since getting those degrees and now I do research with dogs and cats and horses too.

Kristiina Wilson:

Oh cool, that's amazing. So what inspired you to focus on feline facial expressions, to kind of move from primates to cats?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yes, it's very interesting because I mean, if you go into my office at work, it's just loaded with primate stuff, right? And also I have a bunch of primate tattoos. So most of my life is encompassed by primates. So this cat study that we're talking about today, it essentially came about because a student, lauren Scott, one of the co-authors on the paper she's the first author she was a undergraduate student. She was pursuing a degree in anthropology and she wanted to go to med school.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

She was already working with one of my colleagues, Dr Daniel Fessler. He's an evolutionary psychologist there and she was doing lots of different projects and roles with his lab. But she wanted to get experience working with animals. She thought the idea was really fun and she just wanted to branch out. I have a lot of students who work with me in my lab who don't necessarily want to go into like veterinary school or go to animal behavior, but they just really love animals and they just want to learn more and they can get important research skills by working with animals that can also apply to humans in some cases.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So she reached out to me and wanted to get some experience. So at first she started working with me on chimp projects, but then we got to the point where she wanted to pursue her own projects and she wanted to do something with facial expressions, and because my work is so heavily focused on primates, I already had that base covered.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

We were already doing multiple studies with chimps, with monkeys. I had collaborators that I knew were going to be publishing, you know, things that were similar to what I was doing with other species. So I felt like at the time we had that base covered and we did a literature review together and we noticed that there are a couple of species that just weren't well represented when it came to facial expressions, and that included cats and horses. Even though people know a lot about their facial expressions broadly speaking, there wasn't a lot in the scientific literature about the form and function. So I asked her to pick and she picked cats. So that's kind of how the project got started.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

She wanted to do something independent and she wanted to branch out. So we both use this as an experience to kind of step away from primates and really dive into that comparative aspect, so not just comparing between primate species but compare it between mammals as well to see how are cats similar to or different from primates, but also what are some of the ways that they're communicating. That's pretty unique or pretty interesting that we don't have documented thus far. Right, so that's kind of how all that came about.

Kristiina Wilson:

That's so cool. Why do you think affiliative facial signals in cats have been kind of understudied versus all the studies that exist about non-affiliative signals?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yeah, I think it's because a lot of these studies tend to focus on those aggressive encounters that happen between cats during territorial disputes and when you have that flooding of the literature for a particular context, there is even some publications that we quote in our paper that say that facial expressions, the primary function for cats, is for these agonistic encounters, these fights that happen during the disputes. So I think when you have that perception of the function of facial expressions and you continue to go along with that, you seldom get studies that kind of branch away and try to see well, is that really the case? Because there's also like a high risk, high reward, trade-off, right, potentially doing a lot of research and we've spent, you know, hundreds of hours coding individual facial muscle movements and cat facial expressions, so investing all that time and energy to find that, oh, actually, yes, you know, like maybe it's not what we initially thought, that a lot of these signals are, you know, antagonistic. I think that puts a lot of people off from doing these kinds of studies. But you know, when we were doing our literature review, it makes sense that there's facial expressions that help navigate fights between cats because those are very risky and facial expressions compared to like actually scratching and biting. They're relatively low risk but they're very effective. So it's easier to produce a facial expression of like back off I don't want to fight versus like trying to physically, you know, get into an altercation with another cat. It's a lot less risky.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

But also we know that through the process of artificial selection, domestication that humans have applied on cats, we know that they're a little bit more flexible in their social organization. People have households that have, you know, two, three, four cats. I have a household with two cats that get along quite well and they engage in affiliative behaviors with each other. So it makes sense that in addition to those non-affiliative facial expressions, there's also going to be friendly ones that help when they're grooming, help when they're playing with each other. Just like other mammals, cats play together, especially kittens. So why not? So we kind of figured that you know this is something that hasn't received a lot of attention and it's something that makes sense to us in terms of the social organization of cats because of selection. So we decided to go with it essentially and see what was what was happening, what was there.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah, absolutely. I think the facial expression that most people are familiar with in cats is affiliative, is the slow blink Right, with cats either doing that to us or towards others. And I think as we get more into talking about what your study found, we'll talk about some other ones.

Kristiina Wilson:

But do you want to tell us just kind of briefly about the four main contexts in which we see the intraspecific social interactions in cats? I know your paper covered that, but there were two that you actually dealt with in your study and then two that you did not deal with because of you know where the study took place and, um, just how, how you were able to do it.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yeah, so we're talking about, like the, the mating context, and also like the context associated with um, with kittens and like developmental stuff, right, um, so I mean the. We had the opportunity to conduct this study at a very unique location, a cat cafe, and a lot of the cats that were housed at the cat cafe were adults and they were fixed or spayed or neutered. So when it came to mating behavior, that was not really something that was happening a lot, given the unique structure of the cat cafe, really something that was happening a lot, given the unique structure of the cat cafe. But while we were there, we were seeing, you know, these affiliative and non-affiliative interactions taking place. We were seeing grooming, rubbing, playing together. We saw fights. Unfortunately that happened.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Another context that we weren't able to really observe was caregiving behaviors which makes sense because at the cat cafe, whenever a cat gives birth, the kittens and the mother are moved into another location before they get their vaccines, just for safety protocols, just to make sure that they don't catch anything. Because I mean the cat cafe is open certain hours to the general public and people can go to the cat cafe, they pay a donation fee, they get a coffee and then they can go and interact with cats for adoption. So they wanted to keep the kittens safe.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So because of that structure of the cat cafe, of the spay and neuter, and also like relocating the kittens and the mother for the meantime until they became adults we weren't able to really look at that too much, but it would be a cool follow-up study to see yeah, we have the affiliative and we have the non-affiliative facial expressions. Now how do the caregiving facial expressions and the reproductive ones fall into the scope of things? Um but we just focused for the time being on those friendly and not friendly interactions happening between adult cats.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yes, so how many cats were involved in the study?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So there were, I believe, 52 or 53 cats involved, um, which is one of the reasons why we decided to do this at a cat cafe compared to because, when we were brainstorming this, one of the options we had was going into people's homes that have multiple cats and, but that's very time intensive. Most people have around two to three cats, so we would have to go to multiple households. You have to account to multiple households.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

You have to account for confounding variables like differences in household structure if there's the presence or absence of other animals like dogs or reptiles or ferrets or what have you. So we wanted to find somewhere that had a large population of adult cats, that was accessible, like very easy to observe, uh, from a distance, but also that, you know, gave us the opportunity to see diversity in facial expressions, with all of them living in the same environment. So that's why, which is the cat cafe, 53 cats. Now, the only downside is that a lot of these cats are mixed breed Most of them are some kind of mix of domestic short hair.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yeah, so it would be cool follow-up study to see. All right, well, these are domestic short hairs, but like, what about long haired cats? What about other breeds of cats? How does their facial structure and morphology influence their facial expressivity during these?

Kristiina Wilson:

kinds of interactions.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

But, yeah, that's why we ended up going with the Cat Cafe Lounge, because of the 53 cats that was there, which is awesome.

Kristiina Wilson:

That makes sense If you ever need to do a follow-up. We have 13 cats. Oh nice, Still here. That's awesome. Yes, I have my own lab in our house. We have a lot of cats. Can you elaborate on the specific methods that you use, like the facial action coding system, and just kind of break it down for people how you did the study?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yes. So when it came to going into the Cat Cafe Lounge and collecting video footage because what we like to do is we like to collect video footage of these interactions taking place bring that video footage home and code it because it takes a long time to code.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Like one hour of video footage can take four to five hours minimum to code. So it's better to record all that while it's happening, bring that back and then engage in coding protocols. So for this study we use something called the opportunistic sampling method. So Lauren would go into the cat cafe lounge and she would record interactions that were taking place between cats that were active. One of the problems with a lot of the animals that we study is that you know they tend to sleep and nap during the day. So you might be following one cat right, because you're like oh yeah, rates of behavior, let's follow the same cat for five hours and then we can say, this is the rate of facial expressions they're producing, but then they might fall asleep for three hours, you know.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So we were seeing that happening and we're like, okay, this is not useful for what we're trying to do.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So we ended up using that protocol where, you know, lauren would go around the cat cafe and during off hours so humans weren't present, it was just her and the cats. She would follow the cats the most active bunch of cats and she would record whenever a social interaction took place. So then, using data from the social interactions that are happening, she brought that back home and then we were able to look at their facial expressions using the facial action coding system protocols. So facial action coding systems, or facts, were initially developed by Paul Ekman. He's a psychologist, a social psychologist, who studies emotion, and he developed the facts initially for humans to be able to see the relationship between emotion and facial expression, and he wanted to see which facial muscle movements are activated during these bouts of happiness or sadness or what have you, even though we're taking a more neutral approach to the study of emotion because you know we're not using methods that can get into the mental lives of cats right.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Like we have to just use external behavior, things that we can actually observe and quantify. We can still use facial action coding systems because the protocols are very rigorous. It's very systematic and standardized. So the way that FACTS works is that every single facial muscle movement is assigned a unique code or an action unit, so AU12, for example. Au12 is lip corner polar and whenever you code an AU12, it means the corners of the lips are being drawn backwards closer to the ears Right.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So every single facial muscle movement is assigned a code and it's the combination of these facial muscle movements that creates an expression. Now, this is great because the FACTS places equal emphasis on learning both subtle and overt facial muscle movements, and also the manual walks you through and trains you to identify the differences and similarities between these movements and how to code them accurately and in order to use fax, you need to be certified.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So, uh, you can download the manual on the animal facts website and then request a test. And then what's happening is we're assessing whether or not our answers are similar to those of experts in the field, to make sure that when we are using these methods that we're using in a way that makes sense and is consistent with current coding practices and protocols.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So usually certification with human facts takes over 100 hours. With animal facts there's not as many facial muscle movements so it doesn't take as long, but it's still dozens of hours that you spend reading the manual, looking at examples, taking the test and then you apply it to these different types of interactions, these different kinds of studies. Um, we use it for research purposes. But also I know that it facts can be used for other functions. So, for example, animation studios use facts to be able to learn how to animate faces and make them look more realistic right in movies and television shows. So there's lots of people that use fax for a variety of purposes. But for us, because we were interested in documenting how many different, morphologically distinct facial expressions can cats produce and are these friendly or not, the facts made the most sense.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So sure lauren and I became certified in cat facts. I already had a bunch of fact certifications in chimpanzees, orangutans and so forth, uh, before this study.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

But lauren got certification in cat facts, so did I and we applied this system to the video footage, so we would go in and we would watch video footage over and, over and over again and code every single facial muscle movement that was produced while they're communicating with each other, right, and we documented the total number of discrete movements, but also the number of unique combinations that we observed in the cat cafe.

Kristiina Wilson:

All right, that was a really good explanation, thank you, and it does seem like the facts gives you a much better way to be sure that you're in agreement, rather than just kind of like a standard ethogram that I think is often used and I feel like maybe a little bit on its way out in terms of more modern research. So can you tell us a little bit about your predictions and your findings in this amazing study?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yeah, so, we, based on our literature review, based on the studies that have been previously published, we anticipated that there was going to be differences in the form and function of cat facial expressions. And we anticipated that affiliative facial expressions were going to differ in terms of their physical form, not just with, like the composition of them, like the discrete facial muscle movements, but like the number of facial muscle movements that are being produced to communicate.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So our first prediction was complexity. We looked at this in a previous study and we found that chimpanzee facial expressions are more complex than gibbon facial expressions and one of the reasons for why that is is that chimpanzees they live in troops of like hundreds of individuals sometimes and there's lots of different relationships, there's lots of different social interaction types. That can happen.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So having a diversity of facial expressions in terms of the number of morphologically distinct facial expressions based on movement, but also just having complex ones to communicate different levels of meaning that made a lot of sense to us Whereas gibbons now, this isn't saying that gibbons aren't complex, but they have a very different social structure. Right, it's usually a pair of gibbons and their offspring that defend a territory.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

And they engage in a lot of synchronous behavior as part of establishing their bonds with one another but also defending their territory. So having very complex facial expressions doesn't really help with that process because then there's so many different possibilities that you have to be able to predict and synchronize. So we figured that because of the social structure of cats and because of you know their bonding mechanisms and the fact that they can establish relationships with lots of different kinds of cats in a colony setting, in a household setting, that the facial expressions that were being produced during those friendly encounters would potentially be more complex than those that are not so friendly and also, if you think about it, because fights are high risk, you would want to make sure that, whatever signal you're going to use, it's very clear, it's very obvious.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

there's no room for misinterpretation there. So, it makes sense not to see a lot of diversity in terms of the physical form of those expressions. So that was our first prediction. The second one was the composition. So not looking at like the number of muscle movements being produced during these signaling bouts, but looking more about like what types of facial muscle movements Is it the?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

case that the lip corner polar is only seen during friendly and versus non-friendly? Is it the case that you know, raising the upper lip to expose the teeth, you're only going to see that during non-friendly, vice versa? So we wanted to see if there's differences in the composition. So after conducting our study and looking at all the different facial expressions that are produced during these affiliative and non-affiliative interactions, we didn't really find support for our first prediction. We found that for both friendly and non-friendly, the average number of facial muscle movements per facial expression is about three. It's about consistent also with other studies with other animals.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So, it seems like there's not really a lot going on there when it comes to social function.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

This is just something in terms of the average that these animals are producing, perhaps due to morphological constraints or anatomical constraints, but we did find differences in the composition though. So there are certain facial muscle movements that very strongly correspond to either affiliative or non-affiliative interactions. So when you put all those together and you compare them to like a neutral resting face, right. So when you put all those together and you compare them to like a neutral resting face with friendly interactions, what we often see is that the ears will go forward and then the whiskers will go forward, and usually the eyes are going to be closed. And if you think about it like this, I mean it's almost as if the cat is reaching out to touch the other cat. They feel comfortable, they feel happy, they feel playful enough to be able to reach out towards that cat.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

But, in contrast with non-affiliative right, the ears go backwards, the eyes are opened and the pupils constrict to protect the eye right and you see that the mouth opens and the lips are being lipped as a response to prepare, potentially, for bites, prepare for a fight. So we see that, in contrast to like going forward, you're going backwards essentially, which you know again, kind of makes sense in terms of the kinds of social interactions that cats are engaging in on a daily basis. But also makes sense that, even though there's lots of different kinds of facial expressions we found 276, right there's still consistency and similarities in the kinds of facial muscle movements that appear in those combinations, in those facial expressions. So even though maybe, for example, you might have a friendly facial expression where the ears are going forward, the whiskers are going forward and the eyes are closed, maybe that's accompanied by purring, maybe that's accompanied by, you know, other kinds of facial muscle movements, like the corners of the cheeks raising or something like that I mean that's totally fine and maybe there's different levels of meaning.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So that's one of the follow-up studies we plan to do is see whether or not there's differences in the subcategories of affiliative interactions and if that corresponds to you know different kinds of facial muscle movements there. But it makes sense that there's similarities across these expressions. Right that all friendly ones, or most friendly ones, are going to have these movements and most non-friendly ones are going to have this other set of movements associated with it. Make it very clear and easy to communicate.

Kristiina Wilson:

That absolutely makes sense. Cats don't have the best vision in the world, right Like I think everyone who has a cat knows that if you put a treat right down in front of it, it's going to have a really hard time seeing that treat and you kind of have to make like a noise. You have to kind of give them some other cues, because they don't have vision is not their primary sense. So I'm I'm personally very interested in how this not amazing vision plays a role in their identification of these facial expressions. Did you like explore that at all, or do you have any thoughts on it?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yeah. So in terms of thoughts, I mean, one of the things that we didn't do but we can do in the future with follow-up studies, is look at the intensity of individual facial muscle movements.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So in the original facts manual, paul Ekman outlines a coding system that's based on an ordinal scale where not only are you coding presence or absence of certain facial muscle movements, but you're coding their intensity on a scale from A to E.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Muscle movements, but you're coding their intensity on a scale from A to E. So A is very subtle, e is very overt, it's very obvious and it's the most extreme form of that movement you can possibly produce. So this isn't something that we explored for this particular study, mainly because when we try doing this with chimpanzees, when it comes to coding on an ordinal scale from 1 to 5 or A to E, a lot of people choose the middle and it's very. One of the problems is that it's subjective, but also because other movements are happening that influences the intensity coding. So, for example, if you're watching a cat that's producing like a play face where the lip is relaxed on the bottom, the mouth is open, the jaw's going down, the corners of the lips might look a little bit more intense during that movement because there's other mouth opening features that are being produced, but in reality that movement might be kind of subtle in comparison.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So there's a lot of confounding variables there, making it difficult to code. So with chimpanzees it didn't really pan out, so we didn't really do it for this particular study. But that's definitely a follow-up option. I think one of the things to consider is Paul Ekman describes it in the human facts manual but there's not really a lot of information about how to do that kind of coding in the cat facts manual or the dog facts or the horse facts?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So that would be something that needs to be developed first and rigorously tested through inter-observer liability, through coding certifications, before that can be applied to the study.

Kristiina Wilson:

What about and I know this is I'm just adding problems what about? What about tail movements? And this is completely outside the scope of what you look at, but tails are so important to cat communication. I wonder if at some point you or someone else would want to look at facial expressions with tail expression as well and see what changes, if any, that makes to results that you get.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Absolutely yeah, I mean, a lot of the studies that I've published before with primates involve not just facial expressions but manual gestures.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So, communicative movements of the arms, hands, legs, torso, and a lot of animals utilize multimodal communication, Even things like insects, for example, like they use a combinational olfactory and visual or tactile and so forth to communicate with one another. So you know, with cats it makes sense that chances are the tail movements and the positional behaviors and also head movements, generally speaking, likely factor in to those expressions, Because oftentimes when you think of a cat that's about to be aggressive, usually think of the fur on the back stands up the tail is going to be outwards and they kind of like raise themselves a little bit and they kind of like move into a I like to call it the boomerang format right, where they're kind of like turning in on themselves a little bit.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So those types of movements are in fact happening during the study. They're happening while these facial expressions are being produced, but there's a lot more publications on the positional behavior compared to the faces.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So our starting point was just like first putting this information out there and now we're currently engaging in a bunch of follow-up studies. Um, we have a couple of studies that are under review. We've gotten revised and resubmit requests. Those have been resubmitted. We're hoping those come out very soon Um yes, very exciting. But, like we, we now are expanding past, just looking at the facial expressions and those compositions and we're seeing how they're actually using them in the social interaction.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So, you know, for example, do cats do rapid facial mimicry, like humans, like primates, like sun bears, like a bunch of animals do? When it comes to these interactions, are they waiting for a response? Are they engaging in flexible and intentional communication? So we're waiting on. Hopefully, fingers crossed, again, these studies will be approved and then we can kind of talk more about how these facial expressions they're only a small part of a bigger picture of interesting cognitive phenomena that cats are engaging in on a daily basis, but also how this relates to other kinds of bodily movements and other forms of communication as well.

Kristiina Wilson:

That's super cool. I'm excited. I hope no more rounds of changes. So in your study you suggested that domestication influenced a lot of the development of these cats' intraspecific facial signaling. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yes, when you compare domesticated cats to other cat species like wild cats and big cats.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

We noticed that domesticated cats tend to be a little bit more flexible in their social organization. You know, they can be happy by themselves in a household, in an apartment, and they also thrive on literal islands and massive cat colonies interacting with each other on a daily basis. So you know, compared to their wildcat counterparts, cats are pretty social right. Oftentimes we have this perception of cats as being antisocial and just fighting each other all the time. But the reality is, compared to other types of feline species out there, they're really social and they're very flexible in that social organization. So it seems like, you know, part of that flexibility in their social organization is somewhat in part due to human influence. We see that a lot of domesticated species not just cats but goats and sheep and whatnot they become more social with each other and affiliative with each other and tolerant over time, because we're selecting for those traits right we want cats, that we want to have a bunch of cats in the house and we want them to get along with one another.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

We want to be able to have species that can interact with one another. There's some really cool research this is a sidebar, but there's really cool research on dog horse interactions and facial expressions that they understand. Like horses respond to the facial expressions of dogs accordingly, and it seems like part of that is due to domestication.

Kristiina Wilson:

We as humans.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

We want these animals to be social with us, with other animals, and as a result, that's changing their social landscape, even when humans are out of the picture and you're looking at islands that have cats on it where there's no humans present. I mean, they're still engaging in these kinds of social interactions and that interesting social structure.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So it seems like having these facial expressions helps to navigate a wide variety of both friendly and not friendly social interactions, and that's largely in part, facilitated, potentially, by the fact that humans were selecting for sociability. Now, in order to verify this claim, we would need to do some comparative stuff with big cats.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So like let's say, doing tigers and lions and see how are they using these facial muscle movements during communication and how's that similar to or different from domesticated cats? How about Scottish wild cats? What are they doing that is similar to or different from domesticated cats? Because that would let us know if we're seeing that, let's say hypothetically, in contrast to domesticated cats, they're producing, you know, fewer facial muscle movements during these bouts of communication. All of the facial expressions are the result of fights and agonism and there's different kinds of facial muscle movements that are associated with those. That would kind of indicate that there's something interesting happening with this domesticated species, domesticated cats, that we're not really seeing elsewhere because of human influence. So we would need to do some follow-up studies for that, but it seems very plausible given that unique social structure that's been facilitated by humans.

Kristiina Wilson:

Do you think it could be also less that people have self-selected or people have selected cats Because we've done it so much less than we have with dogs, because our history with cats is so so new, right, it's only like 10,000 years of the domestication of the cat versus 100,000 with the dog, where we really have bred and selected dogs to have this sociability like, have all the characteristics that we want, right To make them sort of human dogs, while cats are really still very much cats, they don't seem to be a whole lot different and in fact their DNA is not really unchanged. So and I think you touched on this in your in your paper, in your literature review that a lot of this could be potentially because they needed to learn to cooperate and be around each other, to get food from humans or to, at least you know, get, obtain grain or you know whatever the whole story was when they were first beginning to live with people.

Kristiina Wilson:

So yeah, I don't know.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

That's an interesting I mean Brian Hare. He has a very interesting book on the history of dog domestication and one of the things that he argues is that we often see domestication as something that humans are doing right Like humans are applying domestication to animals.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

We are artificially selecting for traits. But you know, one of the things that he argues about the history of dog domestication is that, you know, chances are dogs self-domesticated at first, dogs that were friendly dogs, that were tolerant and went into these human encampments and they were able to kind of like, at least coexist peacefully with humans, those are the dogs that got more food.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Those are the dogs that got opportunities to go into these, you know, small scale living settlements, and then that's when humans realized their utility and thought, okay, yeah, this is something that we want to like actually actively select for. So Brian Hare argues for the self-domestication hypothesis and chances are that's also applying to cats, too, right. Where you know cats that you know, if you go outside and you see a feral colony, chances are the cats you're going to want to interact with are the ones that are not going to actively try to maul you, right.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Cats that you know are okay with you approaching them. They're going to be way more successful at receiving your affection and attention compared to other cats. So it seems likely that you know the origins of domestication. There's probably a little bit of self-domestication happening in there as well. As you know, humans taking a more active role in artificial selection too.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah, that all makes sense. Okay, so you had 27 males and 26 females in the study and then you found I'm just reading off my notes cause I can't remember this but you found 413 facial signals from the males and 275 by females. So that's like pretty, pretty skewed. Do you have any idea why the males seemed to produce so many more signals?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

yeah, so with the male and female cats? I mean, all of them are out in the main lounge area so to kind of give you some perspective, the the cat cafe lounge. There's a indoor lounge area that's like the biggest section and there's a indoor lounge area that's like the biggest section, and then there's an outdoor catio section that I like to call it where visitors can go and sit on patio chairs and it's kind of enclosed.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

And then there's also a back room where cats can go to use the restroom, but also if they're feeling a little bit like not social with humans coming in to visit.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yeah, they can go there freely. There's like little cat flaps all around the cat cafe to go into, so that's really nice for them, like they can choose to interact with humans if they want to. Um, so during these types of interactions that are happening. So we followed cats and lauren was going into not just like the main lounge but the catios and the back areas, right, cats can come and go as they please. They can frequently interact with one another as well.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So chances are there's a little bit of like assortment happening there where cats are engaging in particular kinds of social interactions depending on their preexisting social bonds. So it's plausible that you know maybe you have two or three male cats that already have a relationship with one another that she's following and they're producing lots of facial expressions, you know, as part of that bond management, and maybe the female cats you know aren't doing as much of that. We didn't look specifically at like why and what kinds of facial muscle movements are unique to the male versus the female cats because, we were interested in more like big picture species.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

You know level phenomenon, but it could be the case that there's some bonding that's happening. The cat cafe lounge. A lot of the cats they receive are from the streets or have been surrendered to shelters around los angeles. So a couple of the cats that came in did have pre-existing bonds. We had a couple of brother uh pairs, sibling pairs, that came in one of them-existing bonds. We had a couple of brother uh pairs, sibling pairs that came in.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

One of them was a blackberry and black cherry two like long-haired black cats. They were so cute, very, very interesting pair. But we would see a lot of that where we were getting siblings and it was usually now that I think about it was usually like male pairs of cats so chances are. If they have certain kinds of relationships that they rely on on a daily basis and they're interacting with on a daily basis, there's going to be some bias towards them versus, like, interacting with other females, other males and vice versa.

Kristiina Wilson:

Sure, all right, can you sum up your kind of findings and conclusion for our listeners so that they know in layman's terms what you found?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yes, so, very simply, cats produce a lot of different facial expressions. I was very surprised at the number of just morphologically distinct facial expressions because we found, you know, 276 morphologically distinct. You know facial expressions that spanned across. You know 276 morphologically distinct. You know facial expressions that spanned across. You know all of these observations and when you look at the amount of video footage we were using, we gathered like 194 minutes of video footage, but we gathered, you know, 156.5 hours for chimps and got you know 376. So the fact that you know we're seeing large numbers with such small video footage that are comparable to the numbers of chimpanzees, that's very impressive.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So we were very excited to see that you know, there's over 200 different facial expressions that cats are producing. So that was one of the cool findings and a lot of people were very excited about, because they're like oh, that's a lot more than we thought. We thought that cats just produce two you know very stereotypical facial muscle movement combinations and then that's it. But there's actually a lot more. So then when you break down those 276 morphologically distinct facial expressions using fax coding approaches distinct facial expressions using fax coding approaches what we end up seeing is that there's a breakdown of facial expressions that are used in both contexts, but also there are subsets of expressions that are used exclusively for affiliative and exclusively for non-affiliative interactions, which implies, like a very strong social function tied to those. So I believe we found that out of the 276, 48 are used in both contexts.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So, one of the cool things about this is that this could imply communicative flexibility, that facial expressions take on different meanings depending on other contextual factors, which is cool. But then, out of the remaining 228 morphologically distinct facial expressions, 126 are friendly only and then 102 are non-affiliative, not friendly. So we see that there's very discrete form and function relationships, which is kind of cool because, again, one of the possible findings we could have had was that they just are used all the time for everything which you know, maybe is cool for communicative flexibility, but we're seeing that there are some patterns that we can hone in on that.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

let us know, as pet owners, like oh yes, a fight's about to take place. Or like, oh, this is actually going to be friendly. So then, in terms of the predictions, we've already talked about that a little bit, but there doesn't seem to be differences in the number of facial muscle movements produced during friendly versus non-friendly interactions. But there are those differences in the composition of those facial expressions Ears forward, eyes closed, whiskers forward. Usually you see that in friendly facial expressions, affiliative, but ears backwards, pupils constricted, mouth is open, lips are being licked, that's non-affiliative. So we see, you know, these very discrete facial muscle movements corresponding to either these affiliative versus non-affiliative contexts, which for us has been great for branching out into follow-up studies where we can potentially conduct studies on how people perceive and predict the behavior of cats after these kinds of movements are produced and also creating, you know, materials for, for example, kids.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Uh, we've done some like kids tv shows in canada and in france, where you know you can use that information to help people learn more about cat behavior and make predictions about how these cat cat interactions are going to go, which is really cool that's awesome.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah, that was going to be. My next question is are you going to develop or do you think anyone's going to develop like an app about cat facial expressions or you know even just a pdf that's like here's this expression, here's this expression, like let's look for these things, you know, so that this means my cat might be stressed, or my cat might be this, or my cat is happy, like do you have anything in the pipeline in terms of that?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

yeah, we actually have a couple studies. We have um ai, studies that are coming out.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So, like seeing whether or not we can train models to use information about facial expressions to make predictions for you about how things are going to go. We have a collaboration with Companion Animals, new Zealand in the works that is going to essentially allow us to look at how people perceive of these facial expressions and muscle movements and then use the results of that study to develop materials that can be posted online. One of the things that we're trying to do and this this is very ambitious is create a cat dictionary of different facial expressions that are illustrated, have photo examples, have video examples and then just have an entry for each based on which expressions people you know tend to struggle with the most. Which movements people?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

tend to struggle with the most because some of these movements are very obvious, like licking the lips, like very easy to spot, but sometimes those subtle, like ear rotating backward movements, a little bit harder to clock. So it's good to have those materials available. So we're working on some studies related to that, which is really cool, and then we're also developing and looking at tools that allow us to look at other kinds of facial expression phenomena, such as rapid facial mimicry, which feed back into those applications and those models that can be used to predict behavior, because, ultimately, facial expressions by cats and other animals, those are being produced to allow recipients to make predictions and bets about what's going to happen, so it's really cool to be able to use that predictive framework to generate materials that help people learn more about their cats in various ways, and also thinking about the implications this has for veterinary practices, right.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

I know a lot of the stuff has been done on pain and pain facial expressions. But you know, thinking about adoptions, right, thinking about how we can use information on facial expressions to assess compatibility between cats, how we can use that information to assess, you know, housing arrangements in a vet's office whenever you're housing multiple cats together. You know, like.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Should we put these on the separate side? Should we put these together? You know, all of that kind of factors in to different kinds of tools and techniques that we can develop using this information, which is kind of cool. I, when I talked to Lauren about this when the study gained a lot of popularity, we initially weren't planning on doing any more cat studies. We were going to go back to the realm of primates. I mean just the fact that people are really excited, either because they're like I was right, cats are expressive, or they're like I have no idea that cats produce that many expressions and that they have differences in meaning based on the physical form.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

I mean that interest has really inspired us to keep going with it. And as a result, we have a bunch of collaborative partnerships with, you know, cat cafes and also research groups across the world now that are kind of like coming together and working on this to bring this information forward and see how can we potentially transform it to help everyday pet owners.

Kristiina Wilson:

Right, that's cool. So I think now we will segue into some listener questions. The first one that I have is what does it mean if my cat doesn't return my slow blinks? Do you have any thoughts on that? Oh no.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yeah, yeah, um. You know the this study and our research mostly looks at cat cat interactions, right? So I can't unfortunately I can't tell you much about your own personal interactions with your cat. I will say, though, that there's a lot of interesting studies that are coming out. One of the ones that kind of relates back to this in a tangential way is Baby Talk with cats. Yes, so dogs love baby talk they eat that up, um, but cats it's interesting they only like baby talk when it's coming from their favorite person, Um. So it seems like developing a strong bond with your cat helps in terms of communicative styles, and receptiveness to attempts to communicate is really key there, um, so just keep working at it you know, keep interacting with your cat.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

You know it'll eventually get there, it so just keep working at it, you know. Keep interacting with your cat, you know it'll eventually get there.

Kristiina Wilson:

It might be slow but it'll happen. I would also say that, like I would like to know just as you know a behaviorist I would like to know the history of that particular cat because, especially if a cat was raised as a singleton, they may not understand kind of normal cat behaviors and they just may not have that in their repertoire. Right, we have, we have one of our 13 cats we had to raise from two days old and you know, she was a singleton.

Kristiina Wilson:

She couldn't like the cats in the shelter. She couldn't interact with the rest of our guys until she had all of her shots and stuff. Because we had a, um, a silent, uh, khaleesi virus carrier. So it would have made her really sick until she got her shots. Um, so she was essentially just alone in that really important socialization period.

Kristiina Wilson:

So I see she's just a bit of a weirdo. She does not understand how to be a cat. Her communication style is like hissing and she just doesn't get it. She's just like here's a sound I can make. She doesn't understand. It's a little. So perhaps this person's cat also had an upbringing where they didn't quite learn, you know, normalized cat behaviors.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yeah, absolutely there's a lot of social input when it comes to learning about facial expressions, positional behaviors and so forth. Yeah that's really important to consider as well.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah, and so forth. So that's really important to consider as well. Yeah, so the second question is kind of along the same lines is do squinty eyes really mean affection? To humans or other cats? I guess either. What did you learn in your study?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yeah, so eye closing movements usually associated with affiliative facial expressions and affiliative interactions. So chances are, if they're producing it towards another cat, it's probably a good sign, right, right um, with humans it kind of depends on the interaction type.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So, for example, um you know, aloe grooming and aloe rubbing yeah, that might not necessarily involve, like the eyes closing or the eye aperture becoming more narrow, um, but you know it's typically generally, when it comes to cat-cat interactions, probably a good sign, as long as it's, you know, not accompanied by any of the antagonistic movements or positional behaviors or vocalizations as well.

Kristiina Wilson:

Okay, so are cats communicating with intention through their eyes, like humans, when they?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

stare, this is a good one, yeah, so we're doing a follow-up study that looks at flexibility and intentionality and goal association and cat facial expressions.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

One of the things that I study in primates non-human primates is gestural communication. I mostly do that to better understand the origins of human language. But after doing this study, one of the questions that I've had is well, you know, humans use a lot of gestures and that shapes the cognition and communicative strategies of domesticated animals. So dogs, for example, when we point at something, they look immediately, they understand the gesture, they do the corresponding movement that goes along with that and they kind of understand that we're trying to direct their attention. They understand the intentionality of that movement.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Chimps, you do that. They have no idea what you're doing, so they just don't. You know, unless chimps have been really habituated to human presence and trained to do that kind of thing, they don't pick up on that as easily or readily as you know young to do that kind of thing. They don't pick up on that as easily or readily as you know young puppies do, which seems very quick. So I was very curious of whether or not cats, as part of their facial expressions, positional behaviors and so forth, do they communicate with the same degree of intentionality and communicative flexibility that we see with other animals in their manual gestures.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So that's a follow-up study that we're doing and we're hoping to have published next year, which will hopefully get your question of like does my cat communicate with intent? Yeah, you know which. Maybe, maybe not. Yeah, We'll stay tuned to find out, I guess.

Kristiina Wilson:

All right. Well, we'll have to have you back on to discuss the findings of your study. So another question is is my cat holding his whiskers back while he eats, or is he grimacing?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So the whiskers going backwards during an interaction, so with a cat, cat interaction, right, we found that that particular movement, the whiskers backwards, kind of. Like you know, it doesn't really seem to correspond strongly with the, you know, affiliative versus non. Seem to correspond strongly with the, you know, affiliative versus non-affiliative. Now, with the pain grimace scale, um, potentially does, but when it comes to friendly versus not friendly interactions with other cats, we find that that particular movement not as informative as whiskers going forward. That seems to be more informative of context.

Kristiina Wilson:

All right. Why will my outdoor feral babies give me trust facial expressions but not let me pat them?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Got to build that bond, yeah, yeah.

Kristiina Wilson:

I would just say it's one thing to trust someone who's standing far away from you, but it's another thing to to trust them to have physical interaction with you, Right? So I think it's just going to be time and patience with that's always the key to anything with cats is is patience and taking it slow and letting them be in control and and doing it on their terms. Um, so I think it's great if they're giving you trusting expressions. I'm assuming they're talking about like slow blinks and you know, know the stuff that's kind of out there in the general literature.

Kristiina Wilson:

Um, and just don't, don't force it I think it totally makes sense that they're like okay, you feed me, you're over there, don't touch me.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Like let them come to you um, yeah, there's an. There's a cat behaviorist. I don't remember which one it is, but like their classic go-to is don't force an interaction.

Kristiina Wilson:

Oh, you should never. Never force an interaction, never, ever, ever. I really maintain that cats are amazing teachers of consent and everything that you do with a cat it should be their choice, or they should have the illusion of choice, because otherwise that interaction is not going to go well. What are the most common expressions, and do they mimic human ones to some degree?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Oh, interesting question. So I mean obviously the, the affiliative and non-affiliative ones I described don't really apply to humans because we have very limited ear mobility, which is unfortunate because macaques, for example, have amazing ear mobility, but it's okay.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Because macaques, for example, have amazing ear mobility, but it's okay. Obviously, no whiskers either. Now there are some facial expression types that are homologous. They're widespread across multiple species because they serve an adaptive function that is useful for all animals and the kinds of social negotiations that are happening on a daily basis. So an example of this is a play face right. So play faces produced by humans. Our play face is human laughter right when the mouth is kind of opened, the bottom lip is relaxed downwards, the corners of the lips are drawn backwards, but you know it's produced during very friendly interactions, when we're having a good time. Chimpanzees you know other great ape species, monkey species, bears, dogs, horses, like lots of animals produce this and it makes sense because play just like aggressive interactions. You know play is potentially risky.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

It can get out of hand very fast. So having a facial expression that helps to modulate the play bout right. We've seen previous days with orangutans right have shown that there's different kinds of play faces that increase or decrease play intensity change the type of play that's being engaged in. So this helps to modulate a potentially risky behavior. But play is so beneficial to animals, right it?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

gives them good socio-cognitive skills. It gives them fine motor skills. So all of that is being acquired through bouts of play. So it's worth it to have play and to have communicative mechanisms that allow, you know, during that social interaction, for an organism, an animal, to be able to kind of, you know, control what's happening to some extent, right. So we see that, just like with all those other animals this is another publication that's coming out. We see facial muscle movement combinations, oh, and I also believe we mentioned this at the end of our paper in the discussion we see play faces. Cats produce play faces as well, and you know it's one of those things that hasn't been widely documented or studied. So, for example, rapid facial mimicry hasn't been studied in domesticated cats hasn't been studied in big cats but not domesticated.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

But it makes sense that they have those and they're very similar across organisms because all animals play. So it looks very similar to what we would see in humans. We just have to make sure that we're not assuming that all facial expression types are homologous. The classic example I give when I'm teaching animal behavior Chimpanzees produce something called a silent bear teeth display where the corners of the mouth go backwards towards the ears.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Both rows of teeth are exposed, it kind of looks like a human smile. So when people see silent bear teeth displays whether it be in the zoo or on birthday cards, this comes up a lot for some reason people are like oh yeah, that chimp's happy, that chimp is terrified oh yeah, it's fear, right, yeah it's so afraid it happens during like interactions, where there's aggression and there's a high risk of bodily injury and they're trying to be submissive to reduce tensions.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So you know, we have to be careful because just because a facial expression looks like something we produce, it doesn't mean it's necessarily the same thing or it has has the same function, so we just have to be cautious of that. But play faces are a good candidate for this, because we see that they're produced during affiliative interactions with cats and they have the same facial muscle movements as we see with human laughter faces, which is kind of cool.

Kristiina Wilson:

Can you explain what a cat play face is?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yeah, so play faces are produced when they're doing playful interactions with other cats, with toys or each other. Right, and the way that it looks is the corners of the lips are drawn backwards, the bottom lip is relaxed and the jaw is relaxed so that you don't sometimes you do, but oftentimes you won't see the top row of teeth.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

It's usually the bottom row of teeth that you see, and sometimes there's tongue protrusion that happens as well. So it kind of looks like they're just doing, like, you know, a little bit of yeah I have really bad facial mobility, by the way, which is funny as someone that studies facial expressions, so you know. But it's like yeah, just like the little like yeah, you know. So that's what it kind of looks like and you'll see this during play, when they're interacting with one another, during high intensity bouts, and you know, it's very different from those aggressive facial expressions we were talking about, where the ears are backwards and you they're licking the lips in anticipation of, you know, doing biting behavior or something like that.

Kristiina Wilson:

Um, so they're pretty easy to identify during those playful bouts, which is kind of cool and I I get a lot of questions from people um saying, oh, how do I know if my cats are playing or fighting. So I think that's a good clue. And then I think also with cats, uh, playing is silent and, yeah, fighting is not. Generally there's going to be some sound, because cats would rather make sound, as we discussed, than have actual, like physical contact, which can can really be dangerous for them. You know, out in the wild if something gets infected, that can be, yeah, the end of it for them. So they do want to try to not actually have to have contact.

Kristiina Wilson:

So, they tend to be really noisy rather than actually do anything other than like a soft skibbity-pap and like a scream. So if your cats are silent and they're doing this facial expression, I think you're pretty safe to assume it's play If they're noisy. I would really try to break that up because that's you know, 99 times out of a hundred. That's, that's fighting. Somebody just said when should I be concerned?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

I don't know. I mean, I mean, if there's, you know, like if you have two cats and you could probably speak to this a lot better than I can but like if you have two cats, where it's just like every single interaction is really negative and you're seeing those non-affiliated facial expressions, it seems like with every single thing that's happening, you probably want to call an animal behaviorist or a trainer to like see what's going on and try to, you know, promote strategies for facilitating a more positive relationship. That's probably when you should be concerned is when it seems like it's just constant fighting and it's to the point where maybe there's like physical injury on a frequent basis and it's interrupting or disrupting you know their daily lives and their ability to like eat food.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Go use the litter box stuff like that that's probably when you should be concerned um and I mean the, the non-affiliated facial expressions will help you identify that um, but it's more about the frequency and other kinds of behaviors and whether or not there's disruptions to like things that they need to do on a daily basis to be well, yeah, I would say also staring like if you're just talking about, like, if staring's not technically like a facial expression, but often aggression begins with just staring you know one cat will just go up to the other cat and just kind of just stare at them yeah and that can really start this bullying aggression um and that will

Kristiina Wilson:

often happen around a litter box too. So if you have a cat who follows your other cat to the litter box and just stands and stares, that's not great. So that's something to be concerned about and fix that. Add more litter boxes. Add litter boxes that have better escape routes.

Kristiina Wilson:

Don't have them in areas where the cats can't escape, or have other exits where they can get away from the cat who's staring. Stuff like that is what I would look out for. That that's um a little bit more subtle than just hearing them fight all the time, you know, or finding lots of fur around your house where you're like what? What happened to this cat? Then? They had clearly had a fight. This is the last one. One person said how do I know when they're happy and when they're angry?

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Yeah.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So I think as long as you see a neutral face or you see the ears going forward, the whiskers going forward, they're closing their eyes, they feel safe around the other cat, right.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Because if you think about it like this like closing your eyes and doing things like showing your belly, that's very vulnerable for a cat, right. So if they're doing that, that's probably a really good sign that they trust you, they trust the other cats and things are going well. But if you have those tense behaviors, if you have the non-affiliated facial expressions, the growling, the hissing, the hiding and whatnot, that's probably not as good of a sign, right. And especially with adopting a cat and introducing new cats in the household, it's a very time intensive process, Um, and also like keeping in mind, like we were saying, don't force an interaction and just kind of like giving them the space that they need to, you know, to be comfortable with you and to be able to come out and interact with you. I think that's really important, um, in order to facilitate a good relationship with that cat and your other cats, or just like you and your cat. I think is a good call.

Kristiina Wilson:

Yeah, I think one really good way to know if your cats are content is is to see how they sit with you and with your other cats, and and to remember that for us as humans, sitting face-to-face is affiliative, right that's. It's like us right now we're talking, we're, you know, face-to-face, but for for felines, this is actually an aggressive move, right it's not the most comfortable for them.

Kristiina Wilson:

So when they're feeling like they really are comfortable around someone else, they will sit what I call butt to butt, and I even made up a dumb song about butt to butt that, like my wife and I, will sing in our house when we see our cats. So if you see your cat sitting like butt to butt, like this, they're really good friends. They trust each other. They are touching each other slightly. That is the best scenario that you could see is these cats love each other. They're super happy. They're butt to butt and if your cat comes and sits butt to butt with you, your cat is super, super happy with you and trusts you and does not view you as someone that they have to keep their eyes on Right.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

So do you have anything else you want to share with our listeners about all of your amazing work? Um, sure, if you're interested in learning more about our work and some of the cool, exciting upcoming projects that we have going on, um, you can visit my website. It's just wwwflorkiecom. Uh, we have a lab web page. We have information about ongoing projects, not just with cats, but dogs and horses and other animals and primates, of course, so feel free to check that out if you want to learn more. A lot of the cat studies that we have in review or ongoing will publish information there, and also on the websites of the nonprofits that we're collaborating with as well all right cool.

Kristiina Wilson:

Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to to speak with me and um share everything about your super interesting study. I really appreciate it and I think, of course, this is great for our listeners to learn more about their cat's facial expressions.

Dr Brittany Florkiewicz:

Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Kristiina Wilson:

Absolutely. Thanks for listening, as always. If you enjoyed the podcast, please go ahead and give us a rating and or a review. We'd super appreciate it. You can find our social medias, instagram and TikTok at Hisintel Podcast For cat behavior consultations go to catitude-adjustmentcom. Music provided by cat beats.

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