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When Too Cute Is Too Much, The Brain Can Get Aggressive
The holiday season is all about cute. You've got those ads with adorable children and those movies about baby animals with big eyes.
But when people encounter too much cuteness, the result can be something scientists call "cute aggression."
People "just have this flash of thinking: 'I want to crush it' or 'I want to squeeze it until pops' or 'I want to punch it,' " says Katherine Stavropoulos, a psychologist in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside.
About half of all adults have those thoughts sometimes, says Stavropoulos, who published a study about the phenomenon in early December in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. But those people wouldn't really take a swipe at Bambi or Thumper, she says.
"When people feel this way, it's with no desire to cause harm," Stavropoulos says. The thoughts appear to be an involuntary response to being overwhelmed by a positive emotion.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 01 2019, @07:20PM (14 children)
I don't understand this at all. Cute can get excessive, especially when it's cynically used as a marketing ploy or base appeal to emotion, but why on earth would you respond by hurting the cute thing? If this works the way I think it does, we take "cute" cues from what human babies look like, so does that mean the other adult half of the human race is a potential danger to children?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 01 2019, @07:33PM (1 child)
You could just RTFS:
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Tuesday January 01 2019, @09:06PM
Dunno about other people, but when I get overwhelmed by positive emotion, I break out in tears involuntarily.
I've never had a sensation of wanting to butcher anyone in my vicinity (yet) (AFAIK).
Are you sure Stavropoulos doesn't mean "overwhelmed by tackiness" instead of "overwhelmed by a positive emotion"?
What I mean is: Jeff Koons [wikipedia.org]
SPOILER: don't look if you're hypersensitive to artworks
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 01 2019, @08:09PM (1 child)
Consider post partum depression. Perfectly rational(?) mothers resent their new babies. Why? I'm thinking this excessive cuteness is at least remotely related, but without the hormones.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @03:47AM
A significant (majority?) of 'post partum depression' is a guilt/anxiety reaction to the fact that the baby looks more like its daddy than it does the husband.
But you can't say that out loud, because then you are accusing every mother with PPD of something that only some are guilty of.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday January 01 2019, @11:07PM (7 children)
Heck, I'm not even sure "cuteness" is actually even a positive emotion at its root. Ask yourself - what is the evolutionary purpose of the "cuteness response"? It causes mammals to react positively to infants and children, despite the fact that they are mostly needy, self-absorbed, and generally incompetent individuals that will be almost entirely parasitic on their family/community for a prolonged period. They're obviously necessary, and cuteness makes their otherwise often-frustrating company more enjoyable and their transgressions less likely to be met with the magnitude of response that would be delivered to an adult who did the same thing.
Just as an "overdose" of sugar can result in a nausea response to additional sweets, rather than a salivary one, I can easily see how an "overdose" of cuteness could result in an anger/violence impulse rather than their suppression.
Of course, just because you get an impulse doesn't mean you'd seriously consider acting on it - for example, I suspect you don't seriously consider immediately propositioning even a fraction of the attractive people who momentarily catch your eye.
Plus there's the fact that anyone who's been around kids for more than an hour knows that it's extremely difficult to overdose on the concentrations of cuteness produced by a real child. I'd even venture that if you were to get anything close to the sustained media-density cuteness from real children then there's probably good reason to pour a bucket of cold water on that cuteness response and figure out what's going on.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday January 01 2019, @11:49PM (1 child)
I think it's just a reaction-formation thing where people don't want to admit that they are moved by something, so they huff and puff and act phoney-tough. Scrooge was this way until he finally mustered the strength to say, "Merry Christmas!"
Of course some "cute" things are just annoying, for example, the sound of babies crying should be against the Geneva Convention rules.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 02 2019, @08:30PM
I disagree. Perhaps that's true for some people, but I certainly don't find cute particularly "moving", and it gets old really fast. Even a particularly well done cute baby animal video is unlikely to keep my interest for more than a minute or two, and rapidly starts getting annoying.
Not unlike sugar - I have a horrendous sweet tooth, but give me just a sack of sugar and a spoon and I won't eat much: *just* stimulating the biological pleasure response, without any supporting context, isn't particularly satisfying. Give me a box of chocolate or ice cream though, and just watch how fast it disappears.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday January 02 2019, @05:46AM (4 children)
I don't think that's entirely accurate with regard to other mammals, though — most animals (canines, felines, rodents, marsupials, etc.) aren't cute when they're in the thankfully brief blind-and-helpless phase, as they haven't developed the physical characteristics (neoteny) that provoke that response. Many of those same species are also very unpredictable about how they'll react to others' young even if they're part of the same herd/pack: they might care for it as if it's their own, chase it off, ignore it, or do their best to kill it, which implies the "cuteness" factor doesn't really apply.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 02 2019, @04:53PM (3 children)
"A face only a mother could love"
The cuteness response is generally fairly tightly targeted in nature - other people's children are generally NOT especially cute. If part of you doesn't want a baby, other people's babies probably mostly look like the ugly little trolls they actually are. The full impact of the broader effect seems to hit full force in mid childhood, when they've got the mobility and intelligence to start getting into every damned thing, and not yet enough experience to what they should stay out of.
That said - no, it's not a universal response among mammals, but it is very common. Also, just because an animal kills other's offspring doesn't mean the cuteness response wasn't working - it just means that other drives were more powerful. Usually it's a male that kills a female's offspring so that she'll become fertile again, and the reproductive drive is pretty much a "meaning of life" class impulse, often exceeding even the survival impulses. There's also not really any way for a male to know if the offspring are his, so killing them to increase his odds with the next batch is often a fair bet, especially with more promiscuous species (and there are exactly 0 species that practice sexual monogamy, though there are a few where the females will only mate with the group leader)
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 02 2019, @04:55PM
Just realized a line could be read two ways:
"If part of you doesn't want a baby"
is better said
"If there isn't part of you that wants a baby"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday January 02 2019, @07:18PM (1 child)
In contrast I find that most children are cute to a certain age. Though, some babies are actually ugly and have "a face only a mother could love." Those seem to be fairly few and far between.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 02 2019, @08:44PM
Probably a difference in impulse strength or perceptual binning then. I find most babies to be quite ugly most of the time, even when they're cute - the opposite of ugliness is beauty, cuteness exists on an independent spectrum. Then they pass through a window where they start looking human, while still retaining much of the infantile "cuteness". And then somewhere in the early teenage years they start looking more or less like miniature adults, with no particular cuteness left.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 02 2019, @06:47AM
Because a fair number of cute things are edible. I think we're missing a big evolutionary factor from way back. The person who eschews cute animals from their diet is going to operate at something of a disadvantage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 02 2019, @01:23PM
So you have never done this [youtube.com]? Oh! You thought TFA is talking about a machete!! Glad you don't have bad thoughts.