Killer Cuteness
Have you ever seen a kitten and wanted to squeeze the cuteness out of it? This is a totally normal response, and it occurs when you see almost anything you find cute. Studies show that this response is a sign of a desire to care for the creature, not of hatred or desire to harm.
According to popsci.com, Researchers found 109 people to look at pictures of animals — cute, funny and “neutral” photos of fluffy puppies. The lucky participants then rated how they felt about the pictures: whether they agreed with the statement like “I just can’t handle it!” Or perhaps “It’s so fluffy I want to die!” whether they made them want to squeeze something or whether they were suddenly seized with the impulse to say something like “Grr!” The cuter the animal, the more aggressive the response.
The study’s researchers, led by Rebecca Dyer, a graduate student in psychology at Yale University, dubs the phenomenon “cute aggression.”
For the sake of thoroughness, researchers did a second experiment to test whether the aggression was simply verbal, or whether people really did want to act out in response to wide-eyed kittens and cherubic babies. Volunteers were given bubble wrap and told they could pop as much of it as they wanted.
When faced with a slideshow of cute animals, people popped 120 bubbles, whereas people watching the funny and neutral slideshows popped 80 and 100 bubbles respectively.
Dyer’s suggests that a reason we have so much pent-up aggression over cute pictures is that seeing something cute, like a baby, drives us to want to take care of it. But we can’t reach through a photograph to cuddle it, so we get frustrated, and then aggressive.
Another possibility is that it’s just too much of a good thing. Sometimes we portray an onslaught of positive emotion in a negative way. Dyer speculates that giving positive emotions a negative spin might help us regulate that high energy.
According to scientificamerican.com, cute aggression’s prevalence does not mean that people actually want to harm cuddly critters, Oriana Aragon explains. Rather the response could be protective, or it could be the brain’s way of tamping down or venting extreme feelings of giddiness and happiness. Some things are so cute that we just can’t stand it.
Questions:
- Name the two sources cited in the article.
- Why do we want to squeeze cute things?
- How many bubbles did each group pop?
- Cute pictures:
- Funny pictures:
- Neutral pictures:
