Emotion Recognition in Cats

SIMPLE SUMMARY: The ability to perceive other individuals’ emotions plays a central role for animals living in social groups. Cats entertain social relationships with individuals of the same species (conspecifics) as well as with humans (heterospecifics). Although previous studies have demonstrated that cats are sensitive to conspecific and human communicative signals, their perception of these species’ emotions hasn’t been extensively investigated. In the light of this, the aim of the present work was to investigate cats’ ability to recognize conspecific and human emotions. Our results demonstrate that cats integrate visual and auditory signals to recognize human and conspecific emotions and they appear to modulate their behavior according to the valence of the emotion perceived. The understanding of cats’ socio-cognitive abilities to perceive their close partners’ emotions is crucial for improving the quality of human-cat and cat-cat relationships as well as cat welfare in the domestic environment. ABSTRACT: Recent studies demonstrated that cats form social bonds with both conspecifics and humans. One of the key factors regulating social interactions is the transfer of emotions between the individuals. The present study aimed at investigating cats’ spontaneous ability to match acoustic and visual signals for the recognition of both conspecific and human emotions. Different conspecific (cat “purr” and “hiss”) and heterospecific (human “happiness” and “anger”) emotional stimuli were presented to the tested population using a cross-modal paradigm. Results showed that cats are able to cross-modally match pictures of emotional faces with their related vocalizations, particularly for emotions of high intensity. Overall, our findings demonstrate that cats have a general mental representation of the emotions of their social partners, both conspecifics and humans.