Some time ago (almost 2 years to be precise, June 2020, while we were quarantining on a greek island), Alex was sending out survey invitations with poor results. I suggested he should add a picture of our cat, Pippa to the invitation because who can resist a cat picture?
Long story short, we wrote a paper about it because a) we wanted our cat to be published and b) the crazy idea worked! This week, Alexander Nolte and myself attend CHI ’22: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems this week (virtually) and we will present our full paper on Casual Affective Triggers (yes, we will talk about CATS) on Monday, May 2nd: https://programs.sigchi.org/chi/2022/program/content/71980
In this paper, we coined the term Casual Affective Triggers (CATs – pun intended) to refer to objects that can be included in survey participation invitations and trigger participants’ affect. Our results suggest that indeed, CATs can improve survey participation rates while we found no indication that people who don’t like cats or would rather prefer dogs are negatively affected by the cat picture 
Wanna read the paper? https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517481
Wanna watch a short video about it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSTPpP4CT4c