Cats at the Los Angeles Cat Cafe Make Faces at Startled Researchers

Researchers spent many hours watching and filming domestic cats in a Los Angeles cat cafe, and they determined that the felines can conjure nearly 300 facial expressions. The research is published in the journal Behavioural Processes.

The study — co-authored by Brittany Florkiewicz, an evolutionary psychologist at Lyon College in Arkansas, and Lauren Scott, a medical student from the University of Kansas Medical Center — was conducted at the CatCafé Lounge in Los Angeles. The researchers pointed their cameras at 53 cats to record 194 minutes of catty footage, which included 186 cat-on-cat interactions; the cats generated 276 distinct facial expressions.

“The literature is so sparse, and many studies only focus on the connection between cats and humans over the course of 10,000 years of domestication,” Florkiewicz told Live Science. “At the cat cafe, we were able to document spontaneous interactions between the cats and record their facial expressions.”

The researchers analyzed the felines’ expressions and determined that 45 percent of them were friendly, 37 percent were aggressive, and the remaining 18 percent were either ambiguous or somehow fell into both categories. The subjects were all male and female adult domestic shorthairs that had been neutered or spayed. (We wonder if fertile cats would be even more expressive, as they would certainly have more things to express.)

The findings are interesting, and conducting the study must have been rather fun, but what is the point, exactly? “We hope that animal shelters and humane societies can use our research to help better assess the cats in their care,” Florkiewicz said. “We've also had companies contact us about wanting to design an app that lets people record [and decode] cats' facial expressions.”

Photo credit: Live Science