Have you ever looked at a puppy and said, "You're so cute, I just want to eat you" (you know, in your best high-pitched dog mom voice)? Or felt the need to pinch a baby's cheeks because they're just so freaking precious? Yep, us too, and there's actually a name for this intense response to adorableness. It's called cute aggression.
Katherine Stavropoulos, an assistant professor of special education at the University of California, Riverside, also wondered why we experience cute aggression. So she conducted a study to help better understand the phenomenon. The results were recently published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.
Stavropoulos measured how neurons in the brain fire in response to external stimuli, like photos of super cute (and less cute) animals and babies. If you're wondering how she designated some as cuter than others, she chose photos of young animals (very cute) and adult animals (less cute). For the babies, she digitally enlarged some of their facial features, like their eyes, cheeks, and foreheads, to make them appear cuter.
She then recruited 54 participants aged 18 to 40 and had them wear caps lined with electrodes. While wearing the caps, participants looked at four blocks of photographs divided into different categories: cute (enhanced) human babies, less cute (non-enhanced) human babies, cute (baby) animals, and cute (adult) animals.
After looking at each block of photos on a computer screen, the participants were shown a set of statements and asked to rate how much they agreed with them. The statements were designed to assess how cute participants found each block of photos (which the study calls "appraisal") and how much cute aggression they felt in response. They also rated how overwhelmed they felt and whether they had a desire to take care of the animals and babies in the photos.
As you might have guessed, participants self-reported stronger feelings of appraisal, cute aggression, being overwhelmed, and caretaking toward cute (baby) animals than toward less-cute (adult) animals. But surprisingly, the same pattern didn't hold true for the photos of human babies. No significant differences were observed between how participants rated the cute (enhanced) and less cute (non-enhanced) human babies.
Using electrophysiology, Stavropoulos also measured participant's brain activity before, during, and after viewing the photos. She found cute aggression to be related to neural mechanisms of emotional salience and reward processing, which means both the brain's emotion system and reward system are at work when you feel the need to hold an adorable puppy up to your mouth and swallow him whole.
"Cute aggression appears to be a complex and multi-faceted emotional response that likely serves to mediate strong emotional responses and allow caretaking to occur," the study states.
These results are thought to be the first to confirm a neural basis for cute aggression. "There was an especially strong correlation between ratings of cute aggression experienced toward cute animals and the reward response in the brain toward cute animals," Stavropoulos told UC Riverside News. "This is an exciting finding, as it confirms our original hypothesis that the reward system is involved in people's experiences of cute aggression."
Another interesting finding: There also seems to be a direct relationship between how much cute aggression someone experiences and how overwhelmed the person is feeling.
"Essentially, for people who tend to experience the feeling of 'not being able to take how cute something is,' cute aggression happens," Stavropoulos said. "Our study seems to underscore the idea that cute aggression is the brain's way of 'bringing us back down' by mediating our feelings of being overwhelmed."
She said that mediation may have been an evolutionary adaptation ensuring that people take care of young creatures they found particularly cute.
"For example, if you find yourself incapacitated by how cute a baby is—so much so that you simply can't take care of it—that baby is going to starve," Stavropoulos said. "Cute aggression may serve as a tempering mechanism that allows us to function and actually take care of something we might first perceive as overwhelmingly cute."
So next time you look at one of your pets (or your baby) and feel the urge to squeeze them as tight as you can and press your face into their fur or skin, find some comfort in the fact that there's actually a purpose behind what you're feeling. No, you don't actually want to squeeze your puppy until he pops. Somewhere deep in your brain, nature is making sure you take care of him as best you can.
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“All puppies are cute,” explains Clive Wynne, the head of Arizona State University’s canine-science laboratory. “But not all puppies are equally cute.” Indeed, breeders have long found that puppies become their cutest selves at the eight-week mark; any older, and some breeders offer a discount to bolster would-be owners’ weakened desire. Such fine-tuned preferences might seem arbitrary, even cruel. But recent research indicates that peak puppy cuteness serves important purposes—and might play a fundamental role in binding dog and owner together. In a study published this spring, Wynne and his colleagues sought to pin down, scientifically, the timeline of puppy cuteness. Their finding largely matched that of breeders: People consistently rated dogs most attractive when they were six to eight weeks old. This age, Wynne says, coincides with a crucial developmental milestone: Mother dogs stop nursing their young around the eighth week, after which pups rely on humans for survival. (Puppies without human caretakers face mortality rates of up to 95 percent in their first year of life.) Peak cuteness, then, is no accident—at exactly the moment when our intervention matters most, puppies become irresistible to us. It doesn’t hurt that humans seem to be especially vulnerable to cute things. Research dating back to the 1940s shows that virtually any creature with babylike features—large eyes, a bulging forehead, short limbs—is capable of drawing our affection, from the unsurprising (seals, koalas) to the odd (axolotls, a type of salamander) to the inanimate (Mickey Mouse). But canine cuteness is uniquely human-directed, and its strategic deployment is not confined to puppies. In a 2017 study of dogs ages one to 12, psychologists in the United Kingdom showed that people’s pets were significantly more likely to raise their brows and stick out their tongue when humans were looking at them, visual cues that lend grown canines a puppyish air. Other research makes clear just why dogs seek to command our attention in this way. Oxytocin, the so-called love hormone, has been found to surge in dogs and their owners after they look in each other’s eyes—initiating the same feedback loop that exists between human mothers and their babies. In other words, the more dogs get us to look at them, the more tightly bonded to them we grow. Born blind and basically deaf, puppies aren’t interactive in their first weeks of life, and Wynne notes that many people find animals in this stage alien and unappealing. A recent study focused on humans showed that, similar to six-week-old puppies, six-month-old babies are seen as significantly cuter than newborns.
Which brings us to the final purpose of peak cuteness: to make up for newborn ugliness. As the psychologists Gary Sherman and Jonathan Haidt have proposed, the delayed onset of cuteness in human babies offers benefits far beyond kicking our caretaking instinct into overdrive—it also prompts a flood of social interactions, such as petting, playing, and baby-talking. These acts are developmentally crucial to puppies as well, but they can’t be carried out very effectively with the extremely young. And so “one is not born cute,” Sherman and Haidt conclude. “One becomes cute.”
This article appears in the November 2018 print edition with the headline “Survival of the Cutest.”