It may feel like you've never encountered anything so devastatingly cute in your mortal life. You want to pet his soft fur and kiss his little head. But you may also feel a conflicted urge to squeeze or crush the kitten, maybe even stuff it into your mouth.
However, you don't.
And you might be nervous yourself.
But this urge, which psychologists call "love aggression," is surprisingly common, affecting up to half of all adults. To better understand this strange phenomenon, let's start with what cleverness is.
In 1943, a scientist created a baby schema that identified key characteristics associated with beauty, such as plump cheeks, large eyes, and small limbs. These characteristics, associated with many young animals, were set in opposition to those considered less cute.
Decades of research have indicated that this child schema reliably guides how people perceive beauty. When study participants see images that have more features that the baby schema describes as cute, they look at them longer.
And images appear to activate brain regions associated with emotion and reward. Intelligence is believed to influence behavior. In a 2009 study, participants performed better at a game operation—which calls for precise, careful movement—when shown beautiful pictures beforehand.
The results of another study indicated that people use recycling bins more when they have cute pictures on them. And the fact that cleverness hijacks our emotions is certainly not lost on authorities and advertisers.
But why does cleverness have this hold on us?
It's almost impossible to know for sure, but one theory is that beautiful things just make us cherish them. Because human babies are relatively helpless on their own, it is hypothesized that evolution favored infants who were perceived as cuddly and encouraged more care and interaction.
And, being highly sensitive to beauty,
we see similar qualities in other species. In fact, as we domesticate animals, their forms also change.
Some scientists have noted a phenomenon called "domestication syndrome," where some animals gradually adopt more juvenile characteristics as they become more tame. One theory is that these physiological changes are regulated by an embryonic structure called the neural crest.
This helps determine how certain cells in the developing embryo differentiate and where they go. Delaying or blocking the arrival of these cells in certain parts of the body can cause the development of the pituitary and adrenal glands, which control fear and aggression.
It can also lead to physical characteristics such as floppier ears, smaller saliva and smaller jaws. It's an idea of how selecting for behavioral traits like friendliness can also select for more youthful, attractive physical traits.
Basically, as humans have bred and domesticated dogs,
we seem to have made certain breeds childlike. Some scientists theorize that we may have bred ourselves. The thinking here is that as primitive humans formed larger, more cooperative groups, they selected friendly individuals.
This resulted in some of the physical features that distinguish us from our closest evolutionary cousins, such as small, round skulls and thin eyebrows. But if cuteness is related to nurturing and reduced aggression, why would anyone want to squeeze or bite cute things?
Well, affective aggression is not significantly associated with actual intent to harm. Instead, it seems to be the result of emotional overload.
Some scientists believe that cute things evoke such positive emotions in some people that the experience becomes overwhelming.
They hypothesize that slightly aggressive,
counterintuitive thoughts are the brain's way of putting the brakes on and controlling those intense feelings—which doesn't make you eat a kitten.
Cleverness may come off as a frivolous, innocent quality, but it has enormous, productive power. Not aggressively, but cleverly, the world moves.
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