Graduate
level researchers at Yale University have been researching a phenomena they
have dubbed "cute aggression." Essentially, this phenomena describes
the aggression that one feels when they see an image of something adorable, say
a kitten or puppy. It's not necessarily that people feel angry at the animal;
it's just that they begin to say phrases like: "I just can't handle
this", "It's so fluffy I want to die", or want to squeeze
something.
To
come to this conclusion, researchers gathered 109 participants and had them
look at pictures of animals, which were cute, funny, or neutral. It was shown that peoples' responses
were most aggressive when the pictures were "cute." To further secure
their results, the researchers had 90 of their participants to look at the
images again, and this time pop the bubbles on Bubble wrap as many or as few
times as they would like. The results showed that the cute images resulted in
people popping an average of 120 bubbles, while the neutral resulted in an
average of 100 bubbles, and just 80 for the funny images.
This
research seems to contradict the common notion that when an animal is cute, we
strive to protect it and treat it more gently than other creatures. The researchers
aren't sure why this phenomenon occurs, but they have some ideas. One idea is
that this aggression may come from the fact that we want to hold or cuddle the
cute animal, but we can't physically reach it. This in turn leads to
frustration and aggressive behavior. It could also be similar to the reaction
of children to pets - we focus on not hurting the animals so much that we end
up hurting them. The last hypothesis is that when there is an overwhelming
positive emotion, the response is apparently negative.
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