Becky Evans,a psychology graduate student at the University of Liverpool,recently devised a survey for cat owners who think their cats are psychopaths（精神病患者）.The survey asks owners to describe the allegedly psychopathic behaviors,and so far they have included bullying other pets,and waiting on the kitchen counter to jump on unsuspecting family members.
There's always a comparison when we talk about cats,says Mikel Maria Delgado from the University of Califomia,And that comparison is with dogs,which humans have spent thousands more years domesticating（驯化）.“We like things that remind us of us，＂Delgado said.“We like smiling.We like dogs doing what we tell them.We like that they attend to us very quickly.”
Cats,she pointed out,simply don't have the facial muscles to make the variety of expressions a dog can.So when we look at a cat staring at us with no feelings,it looks like a psychopath who cannot show emotion.But that's just its face.Cats communicate not with facial expressions but through the positions of their ears and tails.
Dogs,on the other hand,have learned to imitate humans.They pull their mouths back into something resembling a smile. They hang their heads in a way that looks super guilty. Dogs that repeatedly raise their eyebrows to make cute puppy faces are more likely to be adopted out of shelters.
As to pet-owner attachment,Delgado said cats are no different from dogs.But she noted that dogs are used to their owners taking them to new places,while cats are territorial,so what looks like indifference to their owners might just be overwhelming anxiety about a new, strange environment.
There're terrifying cats,but there're also cats who just want to stay somewhere allday. Evans has a lovely cat,who definitely is not a psychopath.
The survey,Evans hopes, is just the first step in devising a way to measure psychopathy in cats.She'd like to eventually study cats in their natural habitat-their house-so as not to rely on the word of their owners.The ultimate goal of the research is to devise a test for shelters so they can better match cats with owners.Whether it's fair to call a cat a psychopath, we naturally do it,and it affects how well new owners and their cats will get along.
According to Paragraph 3,cats communicate with humans with the help of ______.