Scientists may have found a reason why you can’t stop pinching the cheeks of adorable babies. Researchers at Yale University describe this phenomenon as “cute aggression”. They studied the brains of 52 participants and found that people have a strong reaction to pets and humans with more infantile features.
The Yale researchers initially found that people reported feeling cute aggression more in response to baby animals versus adult animals. But even beyond that, people reported feeling cute aggression more in response to pictures of human babies that had been digitally enhanced to appear more infantile, and therefore “more cute”, by enlarging features like their eyes, cheeks, and foreheads.
The study also saw that respondents felt more overwhelmed and wanted to take care of cute baby animals over less cute adult animals. 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.
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