The Science Behind Cute Aggression

The latest addition to our household is a disheveled, long-haired kitten with a bronze patch of hair on the top of her head. Her eyes look perpetually worried, and she already has an adorable signature move of stretching her paws long when she’s lying on her back.

Just thinking about her cuteness makes me want to hug her tiny body in a tight squeeze and then eat her right up.

Cute aggression, or playful aggression as it is also called, is a recently named psychological phenomenon. The first paper outlining this behavior was published just a few years ago by psychologists Oriana Aragon and Rebecca Dyer.

This might be the only situation in which a totally sane person can verbally express their adoration in an over-the-top manner without eliciting some funny stares.

According to current research, the cause of cute aggression is pretty straightforward. When we see something adorable, our brain experiences such overwhelmingly positive emotions that it then attempts to regulate those intense emotions with a negative response.

This is how you get a seemingly contradictory phrase like, “You’re so cute, I just want to crush you.”

In a subsequent neurological study conducted by psychologist Katherine Stavropoulos, research participants’ brain imaging showed increased activity in both the emotional and reward centers of their brains when they saw images that caused them to experience cute aggression.

While cute aggression isn’t seen as a threat to the recipient of this emotion, my personal thoughts are that children everywhere who are covering their cheeks to avoid pinching by adult hands might disagree just a tad.

Cute aggression is thought to be an evolutionary symptom.

It’s an aftershock that highlights the importance of nurture for human offspring. In order to keep a baby alive, parents are biologically designed to have intensely positive feelings for their children. This design extends to other forms of care-taking.

The more we perceive a living thing to need care, the higher its cuteness factor.

It has also been shown that features typically belonging to babies elicit a stronger cuteness response. “Big cheeks, big eyes, and small noses- all these features we associate with cuteness,” states Stavropoulos.

This might be the only situation in which a totally sane person can verbally express their adoration in an over-the-top manner without eliciting some funny stares.

While there’s really not much we can do to prevent the inundating feeling of cuteness overload when we see something adorable, we should strive to be mindful of the recipient’s feelings, which could take the form of discomfort.