Factor analysis of personality structure
We performed exploratory factor analysis on the 15 cat personality items selected from the list of Litchfield et al. (2017). We obtained four factors which explained 30.9%, 28.6%, 23.8%, and 16.7 % of the variance, respectively (Table 1a). The value of the correlations between them was relatively small, ranging from -0.01 to 0.30 (Table 1b). Table 1a and Figure 1 show the loadings of these four extracted factors for the 15 cat personality items. As he four personality dimensions were very similar to those extracted by Litchfield et al. (2017), we kept the same names: extraversion, dominance, neuroticism, and agreeableness. However, we did not find their fifth factor, impulsiveness, which was expected to be associated with the adjectives impulsive, predictable, and distractible. In our dataset, the impulsive adjective was strongly loaded on the Dominance factor, whereas predictable and distractible were moderately loaded on the Agreeableness factor (Table 1a).
Table 1: a-Four extracted personality factors and their loadings for the 15 cat personality items. Salient factor loadings (above |0.40|) are shown in bold. h2 measures communalities, the shared variance with the other items, whereas u2 measures uniqueness, the variance not explained by the other items.