Are you a cat person or a dog person? People tend to have some strong opinions along the cat/dog divide - as far as what that means about human personalities, the jury of researchers are out. However, YouJustGetMe stumbled across some interesting research that indicates what a YouJustGetMe for Cats might look like.
In a study conducted by Central Missouri State University, cat owners were asked to rate their pet on 12 different criteria. When this data was analyzed, four dimensions of cat personality emerged:
1) Active, clever, curious, and sociable.
2) Emotional, friendly and protective.
3) Aggressive and bad-tempered.
4) Timid.
"With a bit of imagination," explains the always-on-point PsyBlog, "these four factors can be superimposed on the widely agreed five factors of human personality: the first factor is like extraversion, the second could be neuroticism, the third factor agreeableness and the last factor openness to experience." However, the final factor of conscientiousness is the missing factor. This may be due to a sort of interspecies understanding - humans might not understand how cats would express relative levels of discipline or casualness. On the other hand, it may just have no place in animal psychology.
One legitimate criticism of this research is that the owners are anthropomorphizing their pets - that is, people are just imagining or projecting human personalities onto their cats. However, these 4 dimensions line up quite cleanly with previous research on cat personality in which people rated cats that they didn't know.
(Don't worry, dog people - we'll find you some research, too. Stay tuned!)
Vintage "Smarty Cat" Image from The Gulf Scream
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