When Too Cute Is Too Much, The brain can become aggressive.We can be made happy by adorable babies and puppies. However, researchers claim that their cuteness can be so overwhelming that it triggers some negative thoughts.”I Could Crush It!”: Understanding the Neural Mechanisms of Cute Aggression.
Cute aggression refers to the urge people have to squeeze or bite cute things, even if they have no intention of causing harm. Cuteness reigns supreme during the holiday season. You’ve seen the commercials with the adorable children and the movies with the big-eyed baby animals.
People think we should treat animals and affect animal welfare. People think essential affects how they treat animals. People’s perceptions of their pets‘ cuteness influence how they feel about them. Animal welfare impacts quality of life, which is how sentient animals perceive their lives, and understanding this requires animal welfare science.
Scientific Knowledge
Ethics balances scientific knowledge with human desires (e.g., to earn a living by farming, to keep an animal as a companion, to clear land, and build houses),As a result, we decide how we should treat animals. Animal welfare law reflects society’s decisions based on science and ethical reasoning about how we should treat animals.
However, animal welfare law may frequently set a low standard of care because there is insufficient public funding to enforce higher standards or the public is unaware of the welfare issues. The first step toward ensuring a high quality of life is assessing well-being and then taking steps to improve it.
What Scientists say
When people are exposed to too much cuteness, it can lead to what scientists call too cute aggression.People just have this flash of thinking. I want to crush it,’ or ‘I want to squeeze it until it pops,’ or ‘I want to punch it, says Katherine Stavropoulos, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside’s Graduate School of Education.
According to Stavropoulos, who published a study on the phenomenon in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience in early December, roughly half of all adults have those thoughts at times. But, she claims, those people would never make fun of Bambi or Thumper.
When people feel this way, it’s because they don’t want to hurt anyone, Stavropoulos says. The thoughts appear to be an uncontrollable reaction to being overcome by a positive emotion.
Curiousty
Cute aggression is frequently perplexing and humiliating for those who witness it. According to Stavropoulos, they believe, This is strange; I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who feels this way. I don’t want to cause it any harm. All I want to do is eat it.
Researchers at Yale University first described cute aggression several years ago.But Stavropoulos, a cute aggressor in her own right, was curious about what it looked like inside the brain.As a result, she and a colleague recorded the electrical activity in the brains of 54 young adults while they viewed images of animals and people.
The photographs depicted both adults and children. Some had been altered to appear less appealing. Others were enhanced with big cheeks, big eyes, small noses, all these features we associate with cuteness, according to Stavropoulos.
Emotions
According to the study, cuter creatures were associated with more significant activity in brain areas involved in emotion for the entire group of participants. However, the scientists discovered that the more cute aggression a person felt, the more activity they observed in the brain’s reward system.
This suggests that people who fantasize about squishing puppies are motivated by two powerful forces in their brains. It’s not just reward or emotion, Stavropoulos explains. This experience of cute aggression involves both systems in the brain.
The combination can be exhausting. Scientists believe this is why the brain begins to produce aggressive thoughts. The idea is that the appearance of these negative emotions assists people in gaining control of the positive emotions that are running amok.
According to Oriana Aragón, an assistant professor at Clemson University who was part of the Yale team that coined the term cute aggression, these expressions may help us get it. Come down off that baby high and come out a little faster.
Final Thought
Aggressive thoughts in response to cute animals are just one example of dimorphous expressions of positive emotion, according to Aragón.So people who want to pinch the baby’s cheeks and growl at the baby are also more likely to cry at the wedding, cry when the baby is born, or laugh nervously, She says.Aragon is one of these people: Puppies are just amazing, adorable, and too cute, and I can’t get enough of them.