“I’m gonna take you home an’ pet you, and hug you, and crush you fulla love until your gutsy wutsies come out”
Elmyra Duff, Tiny Toon
Physical attractiveness and cuteness provide some advantages in societies: attractive people tend to get better salary, have better reputation, and cute people are thought to be more social and generally nicer. Cuteness overload, on the other hand, can lead to some sort of neural short circuit, leading to the wish (or even the need!) to squeeze that cute little thing very hard, very much in a way Elmyra Duff would squeeze any animal unfortunate enough to meet her path. This experience is not that uncommon; it is referred to as “cute aggression” (the urge someone has to squeeze, bite, or pinch cute things without the intention to cause harm) and was first described in 2015 by a team of researchers from Yale University.
Cute aggression is part of a type of emotional expressions called “dimorphous expressions”, i.e., expressions presenting positive and negative characteristics. They arise when a person is exposed to a very emotional situation and they seem to help people regulate those strong emotional experiences. For example, people crying at graduation or wedding, people screaming in presence of their idol, people laughing when scared are all presenting dimorphous expressions. Cute aggression arises in presence of a “cutie”, a non-scientific term to define something really really cute, like a baby, a puppy, a kitten, or any other baby animal (N.B. not everybody likes babies and research has shown similar tendencies to desire to pinch/squeeze/bit babies and baby animals, so I’ll just talk about “cuties” from now on).
Dimorphous expressions seems to have evolve to help regulate strong emotions, and cute aggression might have arisen to help regulate cuteness overload. People have less experience regulating positive emotions; most of the time they try to regulate negative experiences by rethinking them in objective/neutral ways (known as cognitive reappraisal). Cute aggression might thus help people deal with a high level a cuteness, allowing them to carry on with their tasks, without having to remove themselves from the positive situation. It is more socially appropriate to cry at wedding than to walk out altogether. In the case of cuties, it is not very adaptive to freeze and become unable to do anything in front of an adorable cutie requiring caretaking. Cute aggression seems to occur to help deal with the overwhelming cuteness and allow people to provide the care required by cuties. But how does it work?
A research team from UC Riverside recently investigated the neural activities associated with cute aggression. The aim was to try identify which brain areas are involved when experiencing cute aggression. In order to do so, they recruited college students and asked them to watch 32 photographs of cuties, while wearing an EEG cap (a wired cap able to record the activity of the brain and isolate different neural areas; EEG: electroencephalogram). Photos belonged to one of four categories: cute baby animals, adult animals (classified as less-cute), more cute morphed babies, and less cute morphed babies (morphed mean they further accentuated or reduced the level of cuteness in babies by enlarging/reducing the size of the eyes and the head). Researchers also collected behaviour tendencies by asking participants to fill out questionnaires designed to measure cute aggression. And all cuties were equally processed by the brain!
Baby animals elicited the strongest response: participants reported the highest level of cute aggression towards baby animals compared to adult animals. No differences were found between the two types of babies; the authors suggest that it is possibly because those babies were “objectively pretty cute” (if you like those of course…). The neural activities revealed that participant experiencing cute aggression also presented greater activity in the brain emotional system and in the reward system, associated with motivation and pleasure.
To go further, authors suggested widening their sampled population. It would be interesting to look at the difference between people with children and people without children, or even comparing mothers in postpartum and more “experienced” mothers. Going even further, comparing individuals who like/want babies to individuals who do not like/want babies could shed light on the universality of the experience of cute aggression. Do you need to subjectively qualify the cutie as one to experience cute aggression, or do you feel it whether you like that specific sort of cutie or not?
Overall, this study suggests that cute aggression is linked to brain activities in two neural regions: emotional salience and reward processing. Not only does the brain acknowledge the highly emotional value of cuties, but it triggers the reward system, releasing large dose of endorphins (the feel-good hormones) into the brain. Cute aggression helps the brain regain control over the reward system and the emotional neurones, rebalancing the hormones in the brain and insuring the well-functioning of the individual, even in the presence of cuties.
This study contributes to highlighting the “normality” of certain dissonant behaviours, such as crying out of happiness and laughing out of fear. Those dimorphous expressions are regulatory mechanisms that seem to have evolve to help the human brain cope with intense emotions and allow people to function normally in overwhelming situations.
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