Social referencing and cat-human communication

Merola and colleagues tested whether cats engage in social referencing, looking to a human for emotional information about an ambiguous situation. Cats and owners were presented with a potentially alarming novel object, an electric fan with ribbons, while the owner delivered either a positive or a negative emotional message through voice and expression. Many cats looked back and forth between the object and the owner, the gaze-alternation that characterizes referencing, and a substantial proportion adjusted their behaviour in line with the owner's emotional signal, moving more toward exits when the message was negative. The findings indicate cats can use human emotional cues to guide their responses to uncertainty, evidence of a functional communicative relationship and another way in which cats, like dogs, are attuned to their owners' signals.