Think of the kitten in the picture below, or a little baby, or just look at the mirror at home, done? well we describe these well-beings by the word: “cute”, which is a shortening of the word ‘acute’ which means shrewd, clever.
but how we -as human beings- get distracted by cute things? What is “cute” scientifically, and why do you wanna squeeze or bite so hardly that cute thing ?
How’s a thing cute?
Konrad Lorenz, an Australian ethologist, pointed that the characteristics of a cute thing… exist in the human baby. Their design is very difficult to ignore, and their power of cuteness grabs our attention before we even recognize they’re babies. Babies need constant attention and care to survive, They are our offspring. Those physical traits we find on babies are also features that we find cute when they show up on other things, like animals and even objects.
Konrad Lorenz called these features: kindchenschema, Which means the “baby schema” and he specified them in:
- Big head relative to body size
• Larger forehead
• Large eyes
• Round cheeks
• Small chin
• Small nose
we know a hammer that a carpenter use is sharp and severe and can be hurting, but when applying the kindchenschema on that hammer, it becomes cute, like the one in the picture above.
Cuteness and the brain
We know that cuteness triggers our emotions, empathy and compassion. So when we see something cute it ignites the fast brain activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, which is the part linked to emotions and pleasure. and it becomes active only after a seventh of a second after seeing the cute thing (140ms). Morten Kringelbach says: “If you look at a fully-grown person, there’s first activity in the retina of your eyes, immediately transferred to the brain regions in the back of your brain. Here your brain makes sense of what you’re seeing and where. There is a special part of the brain called “the fusiform face” (which responds maximally to faces). However, when you look at babies, there’s activity in your orbitofrontal cortex at the same time as the activity in the fusiform face area”.
it also triggers a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, the cuter the thing is, the more activation found in that area… and mood-boosting chemical dopamine is released to make us feel happy.
The cute aggression
When you encounter so much cuteness, you may lose control of your emotions, and become aggressive, which makes you wanna hardly squeeze that cute thing until it pops or bite it. Scientists call it: “The cute aggression”.
Katherine Stavropoulos, a psychologist in the University of California says: “When people feel this way, it’s with no desire to cause harm”. So even though you might say you wanna eat something cute, you’re not actually feeling aggression, you’re just expressing it. And most of people do express it by gritting their teeth, clenching their fists or feel the urge to pinch. That phenomenon is also seen on other strong emotions, like feeling super happy or super angry. Our brains do response by adding an opposite emotion to it like aggression (in the cuteness case) or sadness to balance it out. This is called dimorphous expression.
in the episode called “Destruction” in Mind Field series in Vsauce Youtube Channel, Michael invited 10 people for an experiment. They had to view a montage of images and take bubble wrap (the plastic thing with bubbles) in their hands and pop bubbles while watching the pictures. the experiment team noticed that the invited people pop more bubbles when looking at cute pictures, like puppies or babies, more than boring landscape pictures, which proves that the cute aggression is not a disease or an issue, everybody expresses aggression when looking at cute things, it’s totally normal.
If you’re reading this, I gotta praise your patience. I guess I’ll call it a day now. If you have any suggestions about new articles/improvements on this article/any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. You can comment here, or email me, or send me a message on Instagram, or send me a message on discord (E11even#1673). Peace!
“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”
— Immanuel Kant
