Last Updated on June 2, 2026 by admin
Your cat closes their eyes slowly when they look at you. Not a full nap-blink. Not a flinch. A long, lazy, deliberate close — eyelids dropping like a curtain in slow motion, then opening again, soft and unfocused.
You probably assumed they were sleepy.
They weren’t.
That slow blink is your cat talking to you. And until 2020, no one had actually proven it.
Why owners misread it
For decades, cat people swapped folk wisdom about the slow blink. Some called it a “cat kiss.” Others insisted it was just contented drowsiness. The internet treated it the way it treats most cat behaviour — with confident captions and zero citations.
The problem is that cats don’t have the facial musculature for the big, obvious emotional cues humans expect. No smile. No furrowed brow. No tail-wag analogue that maps cleanly to “I am happy you are here.” So owners often miss what their cats are actively trying to tell them.
The slow blink looked like sleepiness because we didn’t know to look closer.
What’s actually happening
In October 2020, psychologists at the University of Sussex published the first peer-reviewed study of the cat slow blink, in Scientific Reports. Two experiments. The result surprised even the researchers.
In the first experiment, owners sat in front of their own cats and either slow-blinked at them or held a neutral, expressionless face. The cats who got slow-blinked at slow-blinked back significantly more often. They were responding — actively choosing to reciprocate.
In the second experiment, the cats had never met the human in the room. A stranger sat down, slow-blinked, and then extended an open hand, palm up. The cats were more willing to approach the strangers who slow-blinked than the strangers who held a neutral face.
Translation: your cat isn’t sleepy. Your cat is opening a channel.
The science
The lead author was Dr. Tasmin Humphrey, then a doctoral researcher in psychology at Sussex. Her supervisor was Professor Karen McComb, who runs the Mammal Vocal Communication and Cognition Research Group and has spent her career mapping how animals signal across species lines.
A follow-up study, published a few weeks later in the journal Animals by a Sussex–Portsmouth team, watched eighteen cats at the UK’s National Cat Adoption Centre. They tracked how many slow blinks each cat returned during human interactions, then tracked how long each cat stayed in the shelter before being rehomed.
The cats who slow-blinked more — and held those blinks longer — were adopted faster.
Nervous cats, the ones flagged by shelter staff as needing extra socialisation, slow-blinked more in response to human slow blinks than cats from the control group. The behaviour wasn’t only about feeling safe. It was about asking to feel safe.
What to do with this
Try it tonight. The technique is small and specific.
Sit a few feet from your cat. Not too close. Soften your gaze — don’t stare. Slowly narrow your eyes until they’re mostly closed. Hold for a beat. Open them gently. Do nothing else.
If your cat does it back, that’s the reply.
If your cat doesn’t, wait and try again later. Cats run on their own clock. The Sussex researchers were careful to note that the slow blink isn’t a magic command — it’s a greeting, the way a quiet nod across a coffee shop is. Some people nod back. Some don’t. The cat is allowed to be a cat.
For vets and shelter staff, the implications are bigger. A behaviour this cheap, this gentle, and this evidence-backed could help nervous cats through exams and shorten shelter stays. The Sussex team has said as much in their published recommendations.
For you, sitting on your couch with your cat across the room: you now have a word to say to them.
What’s your cat’s name? Drop it in the comments and tell us if they slow-blink back. 🐱