When Too Cute Is Too Much, the Brain Can Get Aggressive
npr.org
npr.org
Cuteness makes us want to hug, tease and whirl around the little being (basically an adaptation for the offspring to be encouraged to test social boundaries, individual limitations, and explore how the world works), but if it's too small or fragile for that or just a picture on a screen, then one gets a little angry for not being allowed to do so (like seeing delicious food and not being allowed to eat it). At the same time one is primed for playful action (biting, pinching, squeezing), so anger already is nearby in the space of emotions. This might also be aggravated between different species as the reactions might not match the expectations.
Double check they aren't cats.
After a quick look it seems as though it's known that some non-English languages do include singular words for this, but in English it's called "cute aggression", "playful aggression", or similar terms.
I have had three daughters who exhibit what was stated above about super hugs, clenching teeth with saying "i just looove you soooo much" and shaking....
I was aware of this as a positive thing forever. And its lovely as encouraging them to be emotionally engaged with the world is important part of existing.
I threatened to disown my parents when they were deciding to put my younger brother on ritalin when he was a child because they were being told he was hyper, adhd, etc. i told them they needed to stand up to bullshit medicating of him just because teachers said whatever... (no need to go into details, but the schools and teachers in the late 80s were victims of pharma snake oil bullshit, which is why i havent taken even as much as an aspirin or advil in 20 years)...
Children need to thrive, engage, be encouraged to explore all aspects of life, but we have architected our entire society to supress the natural human condition.
But ironically, as a cyberpunk nerd of the 80s i somehow thought that smart drugs and neurotropic enhancement agents were going to be the future hotness. Where is my damn eye implant?
I had a debate with someone where I argued that adderall and others are basically methamphetamines, one atom away from cocaine. Am I right?
Arguably meth would be the better treatment...
It's available but pricey and not available in a variety of dosages.
See, desoxyn
That said: I'm waiting for my neurotropics and cybernetic implants as well...
[1]https://psychcentral.com/lib/6-benefits-of-roughhousing-for-...
6. Roughhousing brings joy.
As a species, humans are hard-wired for roughhousing, so the body and mind are happy when we let it happen. According to studies in neuroscience, when the play circuits in the brains of mammals are activated, they feel joy.
We may not, as a species, need to roughhouse as children anymore in the same way lions and tigers do since we no longer need to hunt or rely on our physical attack prowess to secure nourishment but we are definitely still hard wired to get joy and positive reinforcement from such behavior. Working with kids for any amount of time makes this all starkly clear.
Heck... Even being around drunk people enough makes it clear, haha!
There's also the trope "I'll hug him and squeeze him and rub his fur backwards and call him George" which is a reference to an old Bugs Bunny cartoon.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jPdHaNr0OAY
Related: The Spanish have a word for this.
a reference to an old Bugs Bunny cartoon
Actually, this is exactly what gorillas do. When there is a new alpha male, he will go and systematically kill all the baby gorillas who are still nursing. Why? So he can impregnate the mothers of these gorillas who are unable to reproduce while they are nursing. While human females can get pregnant while nursing a baby, they are less fertile during the first few months of breastfeeding.
Now I'm not saying this the reason why some people have this impulse. Just thought I'd share some interesting info with you. Happy new year!
Edit: I am not an expert on gorillas, just something I have recalled from reading Robert Sapolskys book, "Behave". I'm sure there is some nuance to this infanticidal behavior of gorillas which I have misrepresented. Apologies in advance to the primatologists who read my comment.
Also in a way, the tomcat is making sure that his kittens won’t have to share resources with kittens from a different litter.
P.S: that’s a great book by Sapolsky. I read it fully and just last night, I went back to it for light selective browsing. Very well written. Thanks for mentioning it.
Said another way: A single Lamarckian example of evolution has yet to be proven, so they can perhaps be dismissed with a degree of confidence. OP's hypothesis is not Lamarckian.
(Ugh. I just did a search for "Just So stories," only to discover that the anti-evolutionists have latched onto that term!)
Well, that is my point. They are not evolutionary theories. Despite this being ultra downvoted, my pointing out the use of the term "just-so stories" is incorrect here seems to clearly be something you are even realizing while in the same breath disagreeing.
My Google discovery has almost no bearing on the point I and everyone else trying to clue you in on this thread was making. So your response is actually a datapoint against you here.
Anyways, whether you like to admit it or not, your Google discovery was 100% literally what my argument here is.
I have no ability to get you to change your tone or reevaluate this thread, even after you typed out the discovery yourself, showing that neither did you read my argument, let alone try to understand it. What I said was exactly what your Google discovery was.
There's not really anything else to say here. My argument was plain and simple. Just-so stories are Lamarckian theories that are not substantiated by evolutionary biology.
Since I'm already repeating myself, I'm going to stop responding now.
But I'm glad at least you learned something: exactly the point I was trying to make in the first place.
Here's the thing. Your point seems to be that a "Just so story" is necessarily Lamarckian. In about a half dozen comments, people have been trying to disabuse you of this notion. Something that structurally and thematically resembles a "Just so story" could be written in a Rudyard Kipling Christian framework, a Jedi framework, or a Carl Sagan Cosmos framework. None of that matters.
Just-so stories are Lamarckian theories that are not substantiated by evolutionary biology.
So your theory is that, "Just-so stories are Lamarckian theories that are not substantiated by evolutionary biology." How could this theory be falsified? One way a careful scientist would try, would be to compose a just-so story entirely with Darwinian natural selection as a framework. Another way, would be to formulate a theory in terms of Darwinian evolutionary biology which no one knows how to falsify. There are countless examples of the above formulated by researchers in evolutionary biology all the time. They are as countless as failed ideas, because that is pretty much what they are.
For your point to stand, it has to deny the existence of the above.
But I'm glad at least you learned something: exactly the point I was trying to make in the first place.
Learning that makes me question whether you understand Darwinian evolution in the first place.
This would make anyone question your own intelligence, not other's!
Have a good day. I'm not going to keep repeating myself or continue to interact with someone who has bad faith.
Whoa, no. Now you really sound like the typical anti-evolutionist troller. Go and listen to some of Bret Weinstein's lectures or YouTube videos. "just so stories" in an evolutionary biology context are precisely failed theories in evolutionary biology, and they can be Darwinian just as they can be Lamarckian or Rostaferian.
the phrase was misused
Basically, you were misapplying the phrase as used in a different context in the evolutionary biology context, which you yourself evoked by mentioning Lamarckianism.
Have a good day. I'm not going to keep repeating myself or continue to interact with someone who has bad faith.
I'm confident that 3rd party readers can tell the difference. I suspect you can correlate that with the sheer number of other people trying to disabuse you of the same notion.
Now you're dissecting exactly what your position is, which is to your credit. However, you're also exposing the exact nature of your misconception quite starkly as well.
"Just-so stories," as used by the evolutionary biology community, can indeed be written entirely in an Darwinian evolutionary framework. All you have to do is to craft an evolutionary theory which is not currently falsifiable. Here's one. An explanation for why human babies have an unconscious proclivity for sticking things in their mouths. Infant mortality in non-technological human societies is rather high. This gives them an optimal emergent function as unwitting food tasters for their family and society. Infants represent a good cost/benefit as food tasters, since they contain almost no cultural investment in learning and knowledge, and represent a relatively small group investment in food and other resources given to them in their short lives, so if they should die, there are far fewer resources lost.
This theory is entirely Darwinian. It's a behavioral trait which can plausibly be passed down to descendants, and the mechanism for the increase of this trait is through the reproductive advantage which accrues to individuals living in groups which can discover edible foods and poisons for the least cost.
(Now, I can only imagine that you're going to try and spin what I've just said by imputing intention to entities in the theory, or some misunderstanding of evolutionary mechanisms of altruism. The persistence with which you don't understand that which is told to you resembles that of anti-evolutionists.)
I'm not saying this is always done, but rather it shows such theories are falsifiable in the sense of Popper.
Let's take an example I have been contemplating lately: pruny fingers. When my baby goes in the water, his fingerpads and toes turn wrinkly. There is a supposition, part of the "Aquatic Ape Theory" that is a famous example of an evolutionary just-so story, that this is an adaptation to allow better grips in the water. Sounds good to me - but how could we test this claim?
We could start with physical tests (does grip actually improve when your fingers are pruney?), but we immediately run into trouble. A grip on what? In what sort of conditions? Did these conditions exist in the adaptive context that produced this phenotype? We have no idea.
There might be rare circumstances where we can observe the coincidence of environmental and phenotypic isolation (e.g. cattle herders who are lactase persistent), but the vast majority of features will be lost against the general evolutionary background of our species (e.g. everything separating humand from chimps, both genetically and environmentally, is one confused ball). But even those rare cases are still inferential; the inference seems strong and parsimonious, but its still, at the end, "just so". We can never prove causality.
Also, it's well known that predators prey not just on old and sick individuals but also the young. Predators don't plan ahead, they eat whatever is available and accessible.
It doesn't really need an evolutionary explanation. What is obvious is that babies and adults somehow coevolved in order to ensure that helpless babies are probably taken care of. But that mechanism doesn't have to be perfect. If a consequence is a few overly cute babies get hurt by a few overly sensitive adults, is not a really big deal.
The one about ‘tears of joy’ is something I chased down the rabbit hole. It has to do with lachrimal glands which are basically our tear ducts. Turns out each ‘type’ of tears has an unique signature. And it’s prettt distinct and recognizable under a microscope.
They are connected to fight/flight impulse ..our adrenals..cortisol levels or stress situation. One can cry from relief post-stress or from sadness or from joy. Or from pain after stubbing a toe or cutting oneself. And they are all different.
More here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-microscopi...
So..I want to say that this expression of seeming violence after seeing something cute can be traced back to the same pathways.
This article looks informative about the topic [1]. It poses the question of how disorders such as conduct disorder might affect this. That'd be a really good question to answer.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761456104...
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.0030...
Though I fell off a cliff as a child and don't really want to do it again. This could be why I don't get any strong desire to jump. Been there done that, wasn't very fun.
A maladaptive orientation instinct might be caused by overcompensation for astigmatism or other distortion, or a strong preference for one kind of visual cue (converging parallels) over another (the more abstract knowledge of gravity and the associated impacts.
There is some evidence to suggest that premature babies are more likely to be subject to such disorders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_cliff
In The Imp of the Perverse by E.A. Poe.
I've always thought it was some mental phenomenon where any sufficiently strong result ('don't jump') automatically comes with a weak inverse result ('jump!'). Never figured out whether it was some kind of mental self-check mechanism to catch strongly held false beliefs, or whether it's just a quirk of the way nerves work (sort of like a mental after-image), but I definitely get it. (And it's not just about jumping personally, if I'm standing holding a laptop near a long drop I'll feel a shadow of an urge to hurl it off... it's really weird.)
It's the same fear as standing on a platform where a high-speed train passes by.
As I see it it's the fear of the small gap between realizing and rationalizing where there's a guarantee that the rationalization will not occur or be futile and irreversible.
But those people wouldn't really take a swipe at Bambi or Thumper, she says.
I remember meeting Mr. Newland in BC back in 2007 where he explained that this was made in the last minutes for his final project in animation school. He ran out of time helping his fellow classmates with their projects and had nothing to make. That's why this has no colour. It had to be 1 minute 30 seconds long so he lengthened the movie with text and nail movement. Thinking nothing of it, he passed his class, and this was submitted and won an animation award.
My daughter also does it. When she's in big trouble and mom and I are very mad, she will often laugh at our anger, despite knowing that it will escalate the situation. It took us a little while to realize what was happening, and that she wasn't trying to be a punk.
This sounds really weird to me. If not my experiences, then what, really?
A study such as this definitely makes me suspect that I may be the the minority? Who knows?
Cuteness as an emotion has never overwhelmed me. Cute is pleasant to me like a pleasant color or my favorite geometric shape. I recognize cute but I can't relate to being completely overwhelmed. Most of the time I ignore it.
I consider myself to be a well adjusted person, but I have a confession to make.
Whenever I find myself i a toy store in a 'too cute' section, I feel tension to grow inside me. I have a compulsion to arrange toys in sexual-situation-resembling poses, stage simulated toy-crashes or break the cute atmosphere in similar a way.
Why must this be a compulsion? If you had something else to do at the time, would you be unable to do it without first re-arranging the toys? If not, it strikes me as normal self-amusement/play more than anything else.
I think the OP has some confirmation bias going on. Taking the conclusion and using it to narrate his/her behavior. Unless OP only does that as a response to cuteness stimuli, but the crass behavior seems normally present in people without cute stimuli.
OP, if this is an unpleasant compulsion rather than an occasional whim you might want to dig into it with a therapist, either in search of a cause or a coping strategy as you prefer.
I know I have the same reaction to all of the lullaby music in commercials.
My girlfriend does this all the time. She sees puppies and shit like that on Reddit, and always does this like "growl" and says how she wants to "squeeze the shit out of them." It's not like she really wants to squeeze them and kill them, and it's not actually anger.
It's just a really intense feeling of joy and wanting to take care of them and play with them. If there's any true aggression there, I feel like it's a result of being protective. It's probably a very biological reaction to seeing a small cute creature or person who needs care.
It's like a seething rage of joy.
EDIT: Joking about self control aside, I don't think I'll stop smiling for a long while afterwards if I ever visit England.