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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: 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.