When Too Cute Is Too Much, The Brain Can Get Aggressive

[Eugene]

Source: NPR

When Too Cute Is Too Much, The Brain Can Get Aggressive

December 31, 20185:02 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition

JON HAMILTON

The holiday season is all about cute. You've got those ads with adorable children and those movies about baby animals with big eyes.

But when people encounter too much cuteness, the result can be something scientists call "cute aggression."

People "just have this flash of thinking: 'I want to crush it' or 'I want to squeeze it until pops' or 'I want to punch it,' " says Katherine Stavropoulos, a psychologist in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside.

About half of all adults have those thoughts sometimes, says Stavropoulos, who published a study about the phenomenon in early December in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. But those people wouldn't really take a swipe at Bambi or Thumper, she says.

"When people feel this way, it's with no desire to cause harm," Stavropoulos says. The thoughts appear to be an involuntary response to being overwhelmed by a positive emotion.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/12/31/679832549/when-too-cute-is-too-much-the-brain-can-get-aggressive

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Related: “It’s so Cute I Could Crush It!”: Understanding Neural Mechanisms of Cute Aggression (Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience)

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Fascinating. This could be the root of many antisocial actions.

[defacto7]

2. Bizarre

[cstanleytech]

3. So that must be why so many adults hate Barney and want to kill and mount his head on a wall?

[Igel]

5. No, read the OP. They're discussing a reaction to excessive cuteness.

Not excessive smarminess.

Wanting to kill Barney and mount his head ... On the wall? Where little kids can see it? Argh.

No, wanting to kill Barney and mount his head on the inside of a London sewer ... That's just common sense, self-preservation. We slap mosquitoes, we behead purple dinosaurs.

I figure that Barney-watching is similar to how a fungus can control ant with apparently very specific behaviors that serve not the ant but the fungus. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fungus-makes-zombie-ants/ I wait for the Children of Barney to sprout hyphae.

[cstanleytech]

6. Small point, I never specified where it would be mounted where a child could see :P lol

I was thinking somewhere in a nice locked den with a fireplace surrounded by a few thousand good books with something to drink like a cup of tea.

[Javaman]

4. "you're so cute, I just want eat you up!" nt