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When Too Cute Is Too Much, The Brain Can Get Aggressive

posted by n1 on Tuesday January 01 2019, @03:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the death-to-the-adorable dept.

upstart writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 02 2019, @06:44AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 02 2019, @06:44AM (#780919) Journal
    In steel country, it's used for a high-carbon fuel routinely used to reduce iron ore. Perhaps this was what Runaway was referring to. One certainly would not capitalize that. I'm sure that ordering one's butler to deliver pellets of fossil fuels so that you may display your mockery of Mother Earth is fairly high on the heinous scale. Maybe a five, six if he burns it, which from the reference to the "perfect day" Trump heavily implies.