Marc Bekoff reports on a new study which has found that cats use facial signals and mirror each other's facial expressions while playing in order to get along and have fun.
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Animal play is fun, fair, chaotic, and serious business. The many ways in which nonhuman animals (animals) play with one another continues to intrigue many people—researchers, citizen scientists, and those who just want to know what animals are doing, thinking, and feeling when they play—because individuals of many diverse species "just wanna have fun."
It's a no-brainer—cats, dogs, and many other nonhuman animals love to play with their buddies in all sorts of ways, and they have fun doing it. In an essay called "Playful fun in dogs" in an issue of Current Biology devoted to the biology of fun (see also), I cover much of what we know about social play in dogs, and other essays discuss fun in various mammals and also birds, fishes, reptiles, and invertebrates.1
It's important that play remains fun as individuals wrestle vigorously and frenetically zoom here and there. Play across many species incorporates actions from different contexts including aggression, predation, reproduction and the players need to be able to tell others "I want to play with you, not fight, eat you, or mate with you." Likewise, if play gets rough and out of hand they need to also tell their playmate(s), "This is play—I still want to play" or apologize and say something like "I'm sorry I bit you so hard or mounted you, let's keep playing."
Play is a kaleidoscope of the senses. When canids, felids, and other animals play, they use actions such as vigorous biting, mounting, and body-slamming that could be easily misinterpreted by the participants. Research is showing that many animals including companion dogs work hard to play fair by using "the golden rules of play"—ask first and communicate clearly; mind your manners; admit when you are wrong; and be honest—to carefully negotiate play to prevent, for example, rough-and-tumble play from escalating into serious fighting.
Cats use facial expressions to get along, have fun, and play fair
The ways in which companion cats play is receiving more and more attention so, for example, it's possible for us to get a good handle on whether cats are playing or fighting. When cats are "going crazy" when they play, they're simply being cats and aren't psychopaths. As someone who has focused on play in dogs and their wild relatives including coyotes and wolves, I was keenly interested in a recent detailed study in cats titled "Computational investigation of the social function of domestic cat facial signals" that showed that frolicking felines use facial signals when they play and also that they mirror one another's facial expressions to maintain a play mood—to consent to play fair and to get along.2 A summary of this research is available in an essay by Christa Lesté-Lasserre called "Copy cats: Kitties mirror each other’s faces to get along."
To study feline facial expressions while cats were playing, the researchers filmed cats at the CatCafe Lounge in Los Angeles, California. Details are available in the research paper and in Lesté-Lasserre's piece, so a brief summary of how the research was conducted is that cats were filmed when they interacted and the encounters were scored as being either affiliative ("grooming and/or bodily contact, such as resting together, sniffing noses, allorubbing, and vertical tail positioning") or non-affiliative ("vigilance behaviors such as staring and slow approaches; defensive posturing such as stiffening and piloerection; and fighting-related behaviors such as biting, hissing, scratching, and swatting"). Facial expressions were studied using a method called the Cat Facial Action Coding System (CatFACS) and the researchers used 48 facial markers to analyze facial expressions. Machine-learning models were then used to classify the interactions as either affiliative or non-affiliative and to learn if the cats were mimicking one another using a method called type matching.
The results of this time-consuming and labor-intensive study are incredibly interesting and important. Simply put, data show cats mirror one another's facial expressions and this allows them to play fair and get along. The researchers write:
"Our analysis suggests that domestic cats exhibit more rapid facial mimicry in affiliative contexts than non-affiliative ones, which is consistent with the proposed function of mimicry. Moreover, we found that ear movements (such as EAD103 and EAD104) are highly prone to rapid facial mimicry. Our research introduces new possibilities for analyzing cat facial signals and exploring shared moods with innovative AI-based approaches."
This research also has practical, on-the-ground applications concerning feline well-being. Lesté-Lasserre notes,
"Studies like this may one day help owners choose good feline partners for their cats, or to know when to intervene, Francesconi [one of the researchers] says. 'Using AI to monitor cats’ RFM holds a lot of practical potential,' she says, 'especially when it comes to understanding their reactions and needs, preventing conflict, and improving their well-being.'"
While playing is fun, studying it isn't always all that much fun—but the hard work must be done
As someone who has spent decades studying play, I find this study to be among the most significant to appear in a long while. Numerous animals, including humans, love to play, but studying play can be time-consuming and frankly, tedious to the point of saying, "The hell with this, this really isn't fun!" I remember asking students if they'd like to help me study play in dogs, coyotes, and wolves and far too many said they would. I also remember how after analyzing films frame-by-frame, a good number said it wasn't all that much fun and they'd rather watch the animals play and not go blind trying to figure out what they were doing and why.
I'm thrilled that the researchers who conducted this study on cats took the time to do what needed to be done and I look forward to further comparative work in this area. There are no substitutes for doing what's needed to learn about the nitty-gritty details of how animals communicate with one another in different contexts. This study of play opens the door for more widespread comparative research focusing on how animals talk to one another in many of the different situations in which they encounter one another including when they just "wanna have fun" and there could be serious negative consequences if they don't share that feeling and agree to play fair.
References
1) The online essays are free, and I highly recommend reading them to learn what we know about the emotional lives of many other animals and why having fun has evolved in many diverse species.
2) How to Tell if Cats Are Playing or Fighting; Why Consenting Cats Are Happier Cats; Are Some Cats Psychopathic, or Are They Just Being Cats?
Animal Play Is Fun, Fair, Chaotic, and Serious Business; Dogs Just Wanna Have Fun: Birds, Fish, and Reptiles Too; When Dogs Play, They Follow the Golden Rules of Fairness.
Bekoff, Marc. Play Signals as Punctuation: The Structure of Social Play in Canids. Behaviour, 132, 419-429, 1995.
Social Communication in Canids: Evidence for the Evolution of a Stereotyped Mammalian Display. Science, 197(4308), 1097-1099, 1977.
The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and Why They Matter. New World Library, 2024.
Burghardt, Gordon M. The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits. Cambridge, Massachusetts, A Bradford Book, 2005.
Käufer, Mechtild. Canine Play Behavior: The Science of Dogs at Play. Dogwise Publishing.
Posted on All-Creatures.org: January 24, 2024
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