The Feline Five: personality structure in domestic cats

Surveying owners of over two thousand pet cats, researchers used questionnaire ratings to identify five reliable personality dimensions, dubbed the Feline Five: neuroticism, extraversion, dominance, impulsiveness, and agreeableness. Each trait mapped onto behavioural tendencies relevant to welfare, such as fearfulness, sociability, and aggression, and the authors argued that profiling individual cats could improve management and reduce stress in homes and shelters. The study gave the field a validated framework comparable to human Big Five models and dog personality work, and it is widely used as a starting point for assessing how environment and individual disposition jointly shape feline behaviour.