Many studies have been done about dogs, and most people are aware of dogs’ amazing olfactory senses and how they use them in many scenarios. Although we are aware that cats also have a great sense of smell, not many studies have been done on cats and their noses.
Cats are sensitive creatures, and it shouldn’t surprise us that they can smell our emotions. Cat owners have known for years that cats know when we’re stressed or not feeling great. Yet the results of a recent study, Relationship between asymmetric nostril use and human emotional odours in cats, interested and even surprised many people.
Curious about cats
With so many studies having been done on dogs and interest growing in cats’ social cognition, it makes sense to find out how cats ‘know’ things. Other studies have revealed how cats are capable of recognising our verbal and body language clues to find food, for instance. When a cat owner points at food, cats understand where the food is and then enjoy it.
Another recent study found that a cat owner’s personality can influence the cat’s behaviour. In a nutshell, cats who live in aggressive households tend to be more aggressive themselves.
There have even been studies done on how cats can smell diseases, similar to how dogs can. The study states that recent evidence shows that cats follow human emotional cues and respond to them. For instance, cats watch the facial expressions of their owners, and when their owners show signs of happiness, they engage more frequently with their owners and are modestly affected by their owners’ emotions. But the fact that cats can detect somebody’s emotions using their olfactory senses has been a mystery, and that is why this study was conducted.
The study
The researchers of the study presented the cats with human odours, which they collected from people who participated in the study. These odours were collected while the participants showed different emotions, like fear, happiness, physical stress and being in a neutral state of mind. They then evaluated the way that the cats responded to the smells and recorded all their findings.
Methods
The researchers used 22 indoor cats for this study – 10 males and 12 females – between the ages of seven months and 11 years. The experiment was done in each cat’s living environment. The people in the experiment had to watch videos to create certain emotions, and then sweat samples were taken. The people also had to complete evaluation forms about their emotions.
Swabs with the sweat samples were presented to the cats in a controlled environment in their own homes, where the cats were allowed to relax and approach the swabs at their own leisure. The owners were not allowed to interact with the cats, and the cats’ responses were video recorded.
Two trained observers analysed the video recordings frame by frame, and they were not informed which swabs were presented to the cats. The observers analysed the cats’ responsive behaviours and which nostrils they used to smell the swabs.
Results
The study showed that cats are sensitive to the emotional chemosignals that are present in our body odours when we experience certain emotions. The cats in the study behaved differently to the odours where the ‘fear’ odours provoked more stress-related behaviours in the cats compared with the ‘neutral’ and ‘physical stress’ odours.
The cats also used their right nostril more when their own stress levels increased. This suggests that the right nostrils are involved with the right hemisphere of the cat’s brain, where she processes the olfactory stimulus.
“The right hemisphere controls the physiological and behavioural reactions to stressors, including the emotional ones, as widely reported in several domestic species such as cats, dogs, horses, cattle and goats. Therefore, although we failed to find statistically significant asymmetries in the nostril use to sniff human emotional odours, the prevalent use of the right nostril appears to be related to the increase of cats’ stress levels, particularly when the animals were presented with human ‘fear’. Interestingly, no significant differences in the cats’ stress levels were found between ‘happiness’ and ‘fear’, suggesting that both the emotional odours produced an increase in cats’ arousal and their emotional activation,” state the authors in the white paper.
“Overall, our study revealed that cats are sensitive to human emotional odours and regulate their behaviour accordingly. Moreover, our results provide the first evidence of lateralised emotional functions of olfactory pathways in cats,” concludes the study.
