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Submitted via IRC for takyon
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: 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