Hi everybody and thanks so much for coming.
I'm thrilled to be kicking off the evening.
So my name is Katherine Stavropoulos I'm an assistant professor
in the Graduate School of Education. I am also the assistant director of the
Search Family Autism Center where we do free screenings for any families and
children in the Inland Empire who are concerned that their child might have autism.
My research typically is on children with autism and particularly
I focus on the reward system, and what does that mean? It's what makes you guys feel
really really good when you look at someone you love and make eye contact
and smile with them. It's what happens when you get a job promotion when
someone writes something nice about you or when your boss tells you did a great job.
All thanks to your reward system. The fact that that feels nice is rewarding.
So I usually do work on children with autism and their reward system but I
also am interested in the reward system more broadly. And so that's what this
study is about and what I'm going to talk to you about today is why you want
to squeeze that very very cute baby. Turns out, it has a name, and it's called
"Cute aggression."
So in 2014-2015, individuals from Yale University
published this paper right here, talking about dimorphous expressions and the
title doesn't really say it all but for the first time someone in a scientific
paper described the phenomenon of cute aggression and the internet promptly exploded.
So BuzzFeed covered this. Everyone else covered it and what turns
out to have happened here is that cute aggression is what happens when you guys
look at that very very cute baby or cute animal. How many of you guys want to
squeeze, bite, crush - be honest okay?
What about that one? Squeezing, biting crushing - yeah okay.
So, that's cute aggression. It's the idea that you just really really
really want to squeeze that thing you grit your teeth it's just so cute that
you absolutely cannot take what's happening. That's what it is.
But you don't want to hurt it. You love it. That's just why you want to squeeze it so much.
So what we wanted to do in this research
study is we wanted to understand what happens in your brain when you feel cute aggression.
Why does this happen and why did only some of you guys raise your hands?
Right? Not everyone raised their hands so some of you feel cute
aggression and some of you do not. Snd we want to know why that is.
So what we did is we put EEG caps, these electrode caps, on the heads of 54 lovely UCR
undergraduates and we measured their brain activity while they looked at
different types of pictures. So they saw more cute animals, less cute animals,
more cute babies and less cute babies and before you get offended by that
less cute babies and more cute babies are not what you think they are.
It's actually just Photoshop. So what happens is we were generously shared this
stimuli of these babies the same baby one has these features are minimized-
the cute features: they have a thinner face, they have smaller eyes, they have a
bigger nose. The baby that's supposed to be more cute those features are hyper
hyper focused on right? So we have these the cutest cheeks, the biggest eyes,
smallest forehead, and then on the bottom we have more cute animals, baby animals,
and less cute animals, adult animals. And we measured people's brain activity.
So what we found is we actually looked at brain activity related to both the
emotion system and the reward system and we found that for more cute animals
there was more emotion system brain activity sort of like what we expected.
And what we also found is that this emotion related brain activity and our
experience of cute aggression is actually what we call "mediated" by how
overwhelmed you are by something. So essentially what I mean by that is for
people who said, 'Oh my gosh I cannot take this anymore it's just so cute' -
yeah some of you know what I'm talking about - those are the people
for whom they have more emotion related brain activity and those are the people
that feel more cute aggression. So it's not just about emotion that's about
feeling strong emotions and being completely overwhelmed by those emotions.
We also want to look at the reward system like I said that's kind of my main focus.
We found that people who report feeling more cute aggression
towards these super adorable animals have more reward related brain activity.
So there's also a lot to do with your reward system when you feel
super super rewarded by looking at this adorable animal, your reward system fires
and you feel more cute aggression.
We also found some kind of more complicated
stuff so people who reported having saying 'Oh my gosh that thing is so cute
AND I can't take how cute that thing is please make it stop it's too much' -
Those were the people who had more reward related brain activity and felt more
strong experiences of cute aggression. So for those of you who thought to yourself
when you saw that tiny round chinchilla like I did -
first: that's so cute second: I cannot take how cute that is
please put that off the screen.
For those of you, your reward systems for firing and you are feeling cute aggression.
So cute aggression is complicated and it's a pretty complex
feeling involving both the reward system and the emotion system.
We also understand now that the reward system is definitely involved in this phenomenon
so maybe it's your reward system firing a little bit too strongly so there's
maybe too much of a good thing.
And in the future we want to study this with
specific populations who may have alterations in their reward systems so
for example, individuals with autism, that's kind of the cornerstone of my work.
Individuals with depression, we know their reward systems aren't quite
working the way they should. People with psychopathic traits, lack of empathy,
those individuals also have differences in the reward system and finally we are
hoping to study this in individuals who either are or are not parents or are/are not
pet owners so for those of you who raised your hand about cute aggression
to babies, some of you guys might actually have kids. And for those of you
who raised your hand to the animals saying, 'I cannot take that I can't handle it,'
you probably have pets. So we found out kind of anecdotally this might have
to do with what you've actually experienced in your own life.
So you've experienced your own cute child, there you go: cute aggression towards babies.
So, we're gonna do more research on this and hope to answer a little bit more about
what happens in the brain, why some of you guys raised your hand,
and why some of you guys looked at us like, 'I don't want to squeeze that animal
what are you talking about?' so that's the future direction.
Thank you guys very much for your attention.