Written by Rita Kiraly
Cats are the 2nd most popular companion animals. Millions, including myself, willingly subject ourselves to their rule, and diligently cater to their every need in exchange for the privilege of being allowed to pet, cuddle, and love them. But are cats always the adorable furry overloads they are portrayed to be? Or is there variability in cat personality?
In recent years, multiple studies have been launched to explore the behaviours and underlying personality traits of house cats. The most extensive exploratory study was conducted by Dr Carla Litchfield and her colleagues (2017), where they used data from nearly 2,300 cat owners from across South Australia and New Zealand in an attempt to identify universal personality traits in cats.
Dr Litchfield’s aim was to gain insight into the characters of cats through their owners. Her team created an online survey which ran for nearly two years. In the end, they received 2,802 personality reports on cats aged 1-20 years (that’s a respectable age for a puss!). They didn’t include kittens as their personalities are still developing. In the survey, the owners rated their cats on a scale of 1-7 against 52 personality traits, like anxious, dominant, gentle, affectionate, playful, bold etc., which have been derived from previous wildcat and other big cat assessments.
Once the researchers acquired this huge amount of data, they used all kinds of crazy-sciency stats of dimension reduction (no, they didn’t figure out how the TARDIS is “bigger on the inside”, it means multiple methods of grouping and combining techniques to create clusters).
They finally identified 5 distinct factors to categorise the traits into. The “Big Five” personality dimensions (applicable to humans) are well-renowned in psychological circles (Soto et al., 2015), and so Litchfield decided to dub their model the “Feline Five”: these are Neuroticism, Extraversion, Dominance, Impulsiveness and Agreeableness. They each represent a scale along which the cat can be scored from low to high. The diagram below illustrates these scales.
Dr Litchfield’s aim was to gain insight into the characters of cats through their owners. Her team created an online survey which ran for nearly two years. In the end, they received 2,802 personality reports on cats aged 1-20 years (that’s a respectable age for a puss!). They didn’t include kittens as their personalities are still developing. In the survey, the owners rated their cats on a scale of 1-7 against 52 personality traits, like anxious, dominant, gentle, affectionate, playful, bold etc., which have been derived from previous wildcat and other big cat assessments.
Once the researchers acquired this huge amount of data, they used all kinds of crazy-sciency stats of dimension reduction (no, they didn’t figure out how the TARDIS is “bigger on the inside”, it means multiple methods of grouping and combining techniques to create clusters).
They finally identified 5 distinct factors to categorise the traits into. The “Big Five” personality dimensions (applicable to humans) are well-renowned in psychological circles (Soto et al., 2015), and so Litchfield decided to dub their model the “Feline Five”: these are Neuroticism, Extraversion, Dominance, Impulsiveness and Agreeableness. They each represent a scale along which the cat can be scored from low to high. The diagram below illustrates these scales.
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| The Feline Five Personality Dimensions |
The researchers were confident in their findings, as participants were given detailed explanations of the traits (to ensure a uniform understanding of them), and the data were collected in two countries so they could cross-reference the results to test their validity. However, the study also had some shortcomings: over 80% of owners were women which might affect how accurately the results reflect the general population (although, women do tend to be the “typical” cat handlers – am I right, fellow cat ladies? 😊). Also, some of the traits corresponded to two factors, making the results less clear-cut in certain cases.
But overall, the study was successful in creating a standardised personality inventory for house cats. Each participant received a personalised report with a brief description of what the results meant. Not only that but the owners were also given information on intervention. For instance, a cat scoring high on Impulsiveness might be stressed and could benefit from additional hiding places, a cat scoring high on Dominance might not be happy if another cat joins the household, and a cat scoring high on Extraversion can be at higher risk of traffic accidents or infectious diseases, as they tend to wander off and socialise more.
An easy-to-administer questionnaire derived from this study could also help to reduce the number of cats ending up in shelters and improve adoption success rates. For example, understanding cat personalities can support prospective owners to find the perfect match, and current owners to notice behavioural patterns or changes, and identify underlying causes, thus optimizing pet management and improving cat welfare.
(And it might even help you to spot Professor McGonagall canvassing the neighbourhood in disguise… you never know... LOL)
Acknowledgements:
The author of this report would like to thank her cat for the thoughtful gift of a mouse so that she wouldn’t go hungry while busy writing, and for repeatedly walking across the keyboard, in an attempt to speed up the process 😊.
References:
Litchfield, C. A., Quinton, G., Tindle, H., Chiera, B., Kikillus, K. H., & Roetman, P. (2017). The ‘Feline Five’: An exploration of personality in pet cats (Felis catus). PLOS ONE, 12(8), e0183455. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183455
Soto, C. J., Kronauer, A., & Liang, J. K. (2015). Five-Factor Model of Personality. In The Encyclopedia of Adulthood and Aging (pp. 1–5). John Wiley & Sons, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118521373.wbeaa014