Cat's mind, you don't understand

For shoveling officers, many behaviors of cats are somewhat "mental".

For example, as soon as the computer is turned on, they may run up and pace, give the owner, colleagues, and even leaders on the other side of the dialog box to send a few lines of cats, and then lie on the keyboard on the back of the legs. It has overflowed from the keyboard; the shoveling officer of the multi -cat family can more deeply understand that the main masters of the dawn began the super audiovisual feast of the house parkour.

When they are good, they may be lying on your knees, snoring in your hands; but in a blink of an eye, you may get a merciless shadow, and when the night is rushed up to the feet exposed outside the quilt, you can One bite.

How many people can guess, the cats of the angel and demon binding are really confusing.

But recently, researchers from the University of John Morz and Liverpool University designed a questionnaire for the shovel officers. Their purpose is the "mental illness" of quantified cats.

"All cats may have mental illness." Rebecca Evans, one of the authors of the study, believes, "because these traits are of great significance for their wild ancestors because they need to ensure possession of possession Food, territory and spouse ".

According to its papers, this question volume can directly measure your cat's "mental illness index", and measure it from the three aspects of guts, meanness and inhibitory lifting. The study has been published in the magazine of Personality Research.

The level of scores affects the quality of the relationship between cats and owners on the one hand, and on the other hand, it can also allow the owner to understand the cat better. So as to cultivate a more positive relationship between the two parties.

How many cats are mental?

The more difficult the cat's mind is, the more you want to guess the cat's madness.

Some people have long confirmed that there is a stable personality and behavior difference between cats and cats, like humans and other animals. If you have two or more cats, you will find that they are very different in lively, docile, and all aspects of loved ones.

In recent years, researchers from universities around the world -especially those who have raised cats -have been trying to clarify the connection between cats' behavior and their personality characteristics.

More than one research team believes that cats are a bit mentally ill. In particular, there have been many studies on non -human animals (such as dogs, chimpanzees, etc.) that have shown that ruthlessness and lack of parental social behavior are often linked to psychiatric and anti -social personality disorders.

What needs to be pointed out here is that from the perspective of evolution, mental illness is actually a predatory survival strategy born for adaptation to adapting.

However, from the perspective of researchers at the University of John Morz and Liverpool University, the characteristics of cat mental illness are still scarce. "Some reasons may be a questionnaire that lacks the characteristics of cat mental illness." This is also the direct reason they designed this questionnaire.

This group of researchers first recruited 549 cat owners through social media such as Facebook and asked them to complete a survey online. Specifically, the question involves whether cats show that they can be regarded as bold, mean, or other may not be normal, and provide corresponding examples.

The answers to these shoveling officials classified and merged similar items to the researchers, which finally proved that they supported the three -yuan model of cat psychiatry, that is, these characteristics and behaviors could be classified as boldness, meanness, and (meanness) and thin (meanness) and thin (meanness) and thin (meanness) and thin (meanness) and thin (Meanness) and thin (Meanness) and DisinHibition, a simple understanding is to make more direct and unrestrained behaviors).

Based on these projects, the researchers eventually compiled a set of cat-mental three-yuan model questionnaire (CAT-TRI+) and inspected its reliability and efficiency.

The questionnaire contains 46 projects, such as "my cat likes to explore dangerous places", "My cat will destroy items", "My cat and people are very good", "When others or other pets are resting, my Cats will disturb them "and so on. The shoveling officials need to judge the degree of compliance of these descriptions according to their own masters, so as to obtain the final total score.

And this is the degree of mental illness in your cat.

Is love or prejudice?

In addition to completing and verifying the questionnaires, these researchers also explored how cat psychiatric characteristics may affect the relationship between cats and owners. After all, the consequences of the poor relationship with the owner are likely to eventually cause cats to be abandoned.

They found that the higher the two categories of guts and thin categories, the more rigid the relationship between the cat and the owner; although the cats with a high score may be a bit out of order, they can make the relationship between it and the owner higher.

What's more unexpected is that the less friendly cats, the better they get along with the owner. This may mean that the grinding little monster is born with attractiveness.

In Evans and others, this questionnaire can play a positive role in improving the relationship. In response to the problems of cats, the owner can make some training, or by changing the environment to make his personality in the direction that he is flattering. change.

Of course, this study involving 2042 shovel officials still seems to have its limitations.

On the one hand, this questionnaire does not take into account the variable of cat varieties. A few months ago, researchers from the University of Helsinki, Finland found the data of 4,300 cats after statistics and found that cats of different varieties tend to have different personalities; Related.

Therefore, whether the questionnaire is applicable to the whole variety of cats still needs to be further verified.

On the other hand, the study did not incorporate a more specific cat's living environment into the evaluation system, such as the number of pets in the home and the type of housing. These environmental factors will also affect the cat's behavior, which will affect their personality scores.

Not only that, some overseas researchers and netizens questioned that the researchers had prejudice to cats behind the research.

"Even in human beings, the use of the term mental illness and the tools used to determine are still controversial." The blog pointed out that "there are many very typical cat behaviors in this questionnaire, which are used to describe cats as psychiatric patients."

In Delgado's view, the bad behaviors of cats in the eyes of humans are just the response of cats to environmental pressure, and attributed it as a psychiatric category, which is essentially a prejudice of humans to cats.

It is difficult to bathe for cats, and you know it.

A netizen also pointed out in a message: "The reaction of blaming cats is wrong, and it does not help improve the understanding and empathy of human cats."

However, Evans also pointed out that the team designed this questionnaire from the perspective of the master because the owner decided to give the cat's care level.

"What we want to clarify is that we are not trying to make any individual -whether it is humans or non -human -categorized as" mental patients 'in clinical terms'. Features, Evans responded to doubts in his personal account, "We are not interested in the mental illness itself, but the relationship between its personality characteristics."

Limitation still exists, and research on related disputes has never stopped. But what we need to admit is that existing and next research will play a great role in how we understand the behavior of cats. And this is not much different from the understanding and running in between us and people.