Cats Get What They Want with Crying Purrs

A new study has found the reason why cat owners across the world find it difficult to reject waking up in the morning when their cat pets annoy them with high pitch purrs.

A team of researchers from University of Sussex lead by Karen McComb published a paper in the journal Current Biology, have found that cats who live on a one-on-one situation with their owners have learned to purr on a higher frequency which resembled a baby cry (From ABC.NET.AU).

According to the study, these baby cry purrs trigger a natural instinct to nurture in humans and in return the cats will get more attention from their owners.

McComb call these high frequency purrs a Solicitation Purring. She makes the distinction between solicitation purring with plain meowing which she says that the latter will more likely result in cats being thrown out of the room (The Telegraph).

The team’s study involved in playing back the recorded soliciting purrs and non-soliciting purrs among a group of human volunteers and those who have had no prior experience with cats also “found the soliciting purrs more urgent and less pleasant.” She notes (BBC).

This study is reminiscent of a similar study done by Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, who won a Nobel Prize for his research in the digestive system but is rather widely famous for his Classical Conditioning study on dogs.

From the Nobel Prize website, it is understood that Pavlov found that by pairing the ringing of a bell with the offering of food, his laboratory dogs learned the association between bell and food, and hence every time the bell rang the dogs will start to salivate involuntarily even when no food was offered.

This learning process by association, Pavlov called it Classical Conditioning.

McComb’s study points out that cats learn to purr in higher frequency resembling baby cry to grab the owners attention and therefore get what they want which is food.

Cats have learned through a trial process that when they meow they are thrown out of the room, but when they purr resembling a baby cry, they get the food. It is this association between purring and food that causes cats to continue to use the purring sound.

One of the most important findings of this study is that humans respond differently to different stimulus and in this case with cats, humans’ annoyance threshold seems to be less tolerant with meows and more responsive when it’s a purr combined with a cry.