Oops, I have a "disease" called "I can't talk properly without sending emojis"...

With the booming development of mobile Internet, almost everyone's online chats and social media interactions are now inseparable from emoticons. Especially young people, they seem to have the "disease" of "not being able to talk properly without emoticons", and the "disease" has reached the "late stage". Among these various emoticons, the most popular among young people is the "top stream" in the emoticon world - cats.

Popular cat emoticons on the Internet / Visual China

So, what is the reason why we are so fond of emojis? What secrets are hidden in them? Let's take cat emojis as an example to find out.

Unpredictable cat expression

As early as 2010, researchers at the University of Lincoln in the UK created a website with a large number of cat-related pictures and 40 labels describing emotions. Everyone who opens the website can match the two. For example, if you think the cat in a picture is enjoying happiness, you can select the label with "happy".

Generally speaking, similar studies are prone to insufficient volunteers. However, this study was surprising: within just one month, tens of thousands of people flocked to the website, and about half of them became active users. They enjoyed playing the matching game and even complained that the labels prepared by the researchers were too few to accurately describe the cats' emotions, so they submitted some additional labels.

When the researchers analyzed the data, they found another unexpected result: people's interpretation of cats' emotions was seriously inconsistent. The same cat, with the same expression, had very different meanings in the eyes of different people. Why is this?

Are cats too complicated? With their big eyes, small noses, and chubby faces, cats look a lot like babies, but their expressions are not as straightforward as babies'. Cats are like unfathomable companions that make us ask, "What's wrong with you? Are you unhappy?"

Humans prefer creatures with infantile characteristics. Graph/network

However, this is just our thinking. From a cat's perspective, life is actually very simple: other animals are either prey, rivals, or companions. There is nothing much to say in the first case, but in the other two cases, you need to carefully judge whether to approach or avoid, and how to convey your emotions to the other party to avoid unnecessary fights.

Basic Emotion Hypothesis

So, the story may be this: the cat has already expressed its feelings, but we just didn't understand.

More than 100 years ago, Darwin speculated that emotions are the product of survival pressure. For example, when a cat encounters an enemy, it will open its mouth and arch its back to make itself look more ferocious and taller. In this way, it may be able to "win the enemy without fighting" and scare the opponent away directly.

On this basis, psychologists proposed the basic emotion hypothesis: core emotions such as fear, sadness, and happiness are very important for survival, and therefore have become instincts for humans and many animals. In other words, these emotions are conditioned reflexes that are triggered by specific situations and cause relatively stable characteristics. For example, when people smile, the corners of their eyes wrinkle and even crow's feet appear.

Some new research methods have emerged around this hypothesis. For example, people are asked to make a typical expression, such as laughing, and then photographed. Afterwards, the photographs are given to the subjects to see if they can accurately identify the emotions in the photos. In the late 1960s, American psychologist Paul Ekman took these "emotional photos" deep into Papua New Guinea and came into contact with the Far people there. Far people are far away from modern civilization and their living conditions are very similar to those of primitive humans. However, their interpretation of expressions is roughly the same as ours.

Emotional photo/Internet

Animals are more convenient to study. For example, we can observe cats in pet hospitals. Cats that have just undergone surgery must be experiencing great pain and will definitely express pain in some way. The results show that cats in pain may ignore their owners' calls, refuse their owners' touches, lick and bite the painful areas, and shake their tails violently.

At this point, it seems that we can draw a conclusion: cats convey their emotions mainly through behavior, but we may not understand this very well and thus miss the cat's "confession."

Influence of acquired experience

Seeing this, you may have an idea: to make a cat's "expression dictionary". Take photos of what cats look like when they are afraid, what they look like when they are happy... and then compile them into a book and distribute them to doctors and researchers. When facing cats, people can quickly look up the meaning of behavior and expressions.

Scientists think so too. In the late 1970s, Ekman created the Facial Action Coding System, which uses changes in facial muscles as a sign of expression. Subsequently, researchers began to use similar methods to study the emotions of animals such as cats, dogs, and chimpanzees.

A famous project to study human emotions comes from the US Federal Transportation Security Administration. In 2006, a terrorist carrying a liquid bomb appeared in the UK. In order to avoid similar situations, the US Federal Transportation Security Administration launched a behavioral detection and analysis system in 2007. They produced a manual covering 94 characteristics representing fear, stress, and deception, and then trained 3,000 inspectors at 176 airports across the United States. These inspectors will observe each passenger, and once they find someone who meets the above characteristics, they will notify the police for inspection.

The results were shocking. According to a survey by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, an agency of the U.S. Congress, as of 2013, the system had cost $900 million and had a success rate of only 54%. You know, tossing a coin and guessing has a success rate of 50%.

So, could it be that the features were chosen incorrectly? Indeed, everyone can disguise emotions to a certain extent, and experienced criminals may be particularly good at this. However, there are some phenomena in the human body that are not controlled by subjective consciousness. For example, when encountering terrifying things, blood pressure will rise; while in a calm state, no one can actively raise their blood pressure.

Based on this phenomenon, American psychologist William Marston invented the lie detector. Incidentally, he is also the creator of the famous comic character "Wonder Woman". Subsequently, people added various objective indicators, such as muscle bioelectricity, blood flow, brain oxygen consumption, etc. However, so far, no method has been widely recognized.

Early polygraph images/Internet

Note that these methods are not completely ineffective, but they are very limited. A child may be nervous because it is his first time to fly, while an old man may not have been home for many years and may be more nervous when he is close to home. Moreover, when faced with the same nervousness, some people will subconsciously shake their legs or tap their fingers, while others will habitually take out their mobile phones to divert their attention. To put it bluntly, life is not a laboratory, it is more complicated and subtle.

As a result, many new emotion theories have emerged, such as the two-factor theory and the social construction theory. Although these theories are somewhat different, they all emphasize the role of cognition. When a person faces a certain situation, he will search his memory for the most appropriate response plan. Emotions, facial expressions, and even physiological indicators will be affected by this process.

How to Get Along with Cats

This raises the question: How should we deal with animals?

In recent years, pet fever has continued to heat up, and conflicts between humans and animals have intensified. According to CCTV, at least 40 million people are bitten by cats and dogs every year. Some of them, such as the "Chengdu girl bitten by a large dog" incident in 2023, are related to the irresponsibility of pet owners, and the relevant departments need to take action to restrain them; some of them come from misjudgment of animals.

Research on animal emotion reading has produced conflicting results, with some studies showing that even professionals cannot clearly tell whether a dog is preparing to attack or inviting a playful encounter, while other studies show that conscientious pet owners can judge their pets' moods fairly accurately.

In fact, the principle behind it is very simple, and it is hidden in the content discussed above.

For example: It's the weekend, you are resting at home, and the doorbell rings. You open the door and see that it's a new friend. You must be very happy, right? To you, this is a situation where a friend visits. In the eyes of a cat, it may be a different scene: after a strange noise, a huge strange animal appears in the territory.

Faced with a threat, a cat may simply hide and refuse your call. If you insist on catching it out, it may lean over, lower its head, shrink its limbs, and curl its tail to minimize its attack surface. If you insist on persisting, it may flatten its ears back and make a hissing roar - this is the final warning and a sign that the cat has reached the end of its patience. The next step is that it may launch an attack. On the other hand, if a cat is willing to get close to you, it will walk towards you in a relaxed posture and gently rub its forehead against your body.

Cat in a defensive posture/Internet

In other words, when dealing with animals, we should pay attention to three principles: first, consider the problem from the perspective of the animal; second, pay attention to certain obvious signs; third, pay attention to changes in signs, which means that the situation is easing or escalating. On the contrary, judging the emotions of animals based on photos is not very reliable. A cat with its belly exposed may be expressing trust or preparing for a desperate fight.

Of course, animals are simple, but humans are much more complex. Take embarrassment, for example. It is a complex emotion that means "I know I was wrong, but I didn't mean it." Children aged four or five can already recognize emotions such as happiness, fear, and sadness through facial expressions. Recognizing embarrassment requires judging the situation: Did this person do it on purpose? If he did it on purpose, we might be angry; otherwise, we would understand, "Oh, he knows he was wrong."

Conclusion

Now, we can answer the question at the beginning: Why are people obsessed with emoticons? Because we learn to interpret emoticons in real life, and the Internet is a bit special. It allows people to communicate their feelings, but does not provide enough social details. With the help of cute emoticons, we can convey our emotions more accurately. Because of this, there are two results in the research on mobile phones and social interaction: for people with mature social skills, mobile phones can help expand their social circles to a certain extent; while for people with immature social skills, such as teenagers, long-term use of mobile phones may cause more social pressure.

In fact, the principles of interpreting animal emotions are also applicable to human life. If we put down our phones at the right time and carefully observe other people's situations, we may be able to accurately understand their emotions, make new friends, and gain stable social support.