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NEW ORLEANS — Ever reacted to the sight of a cute puppy or darling infant by squealing, "I want to eat you up!"? Or maybe you can't help but want to pinch your grandbaby's adorable cheeks. You're not alone. New research finds that seemingly strange aggressive responses to cuteness are actually the norm.

In fact, people not only verbalize these aggressive desires with phrases like, "I just want to squeeze something!" they also really do act them out. In the study, presented Friday (Jan. 18) here at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that people watching a slideshow of adorable pictures popped more bubbles on a sheet of bubble wrap than did people viewing funny or neutral pictures.

"We think it's about high positive-affect, an approach orientation and almost a sense of lost control," said study researcher Rebecca Dyer, a graduate student in psychology at Yale University. "You know, you can't stand it, you can't handle it, that kind of thing."

Dyer got interested in what she and her colleagues call "cute aggression" after chatting with a fellow student about how adorable Internet pictures often produce the desire to squish or squeeze the cute critter. All the existing research on cuteness suggests the reaction should be the opposite, she told LiveScience. People should want to treat a cute thing with gentleness and care. [ Gallery: World's Cutest Baby Wild Animals ]

And indeed, Dyer said, it's not as though people really want to hurt a basketful of kittens when they see the furballs tumbling all over one another.  

"We don't have a bunch of budding sociopaths in our studies that you have to worry about," she said.

But something odd seemed to be going on. So the researchers first ran an experiment to see if cuteness aggression was a real phenomenon. They recruited 109 participants online to look at pictures of cute, funny or neutral animals. A cute animal might be a fluffy puppy, while a funny animal could be a dog with its head out a car window, jowls flapping. A neutral animal might be an older dog with a serious expression.

The participants rated the pictures on cuteness and funniness, as well as on how much they felt the pictures made them lose control — for example, if they agreed with statements such as "I can't handle it!" The participants also rated the extent to which the pictures made them "want to say something like 'grr!'" and "want to squeeze something."

Sure enough, the cuter the animal, the less control and more desire to "grrr" and squeeze something that people felt. Cute animals produced this feeling significantly more strongly than did funny animals. The funny critters in turn produced the feeling more strongly than did neutral animals, perhaps because the funny animals were perceived as cute, too, Dyer said.

Still, those results could have merely identified a verbal expression for cuteness, rather than a real feeling. So Dyer and her colleagues asked 90 male and female volunteers to come into a psychology laboratory and view a slideshow of cute, funny and neutral animals.

Researchers told the participants that this was a study of motor activity and memory, and then gave the subjects sheets of bubble wrap. The participants were instructed to pop as many or as few bubbles as they wanted, just as long as they were doing something involving motion.

In fact, the researchers really wanted to know if people would respond to cute animals with an outward display of aggression, popping more bubbles, compared with people looking at neutral or funny animals.

That's exactly what happened. The people watching a cute slideshow popped 120 bubbles, on average, compared with 80 for the funny slideshow and just a hair over 100 for the neutral one.

Dyer said she and her colleagues aren't yet sure why cuteness seems to trigger expressions of aggression, even relatively harmless ones. It's possible that seeing a wide-eyed baby or roly-poly pup triggers our drive to care for that creature, Dyer said. But since the animal is just a picture, and since even in real life we might not be able to care for the creature as much as we want, this urge may be frustrated, she said. That frustration could lead to aggression. [ 10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain ]

Alternatively, people could be trying so hard not to hurt the animal that they actually do so, much as a child wanting to care for a cat might squeeze it too tightly (and get scratched for the effort).

Or the reason might not be specific to cuteness, Dyer said. Many overwhelmingly positive emotions look negative, as when Miss America sobs while receiving her crown. Such high levels of positive emotion may overwhelm people.

"It might be that how we deal with high positive-emotion is to sort of give it a negative pitch somehow, Dyer said. "That sort of regulates, keeps us level and releases that energy."

More from LiveScience:

• Baby Panda Pics: See a Cute Cub Growing Up
• Fight, Fight, Fight: The History of Human Aggression
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Reuters

Cutest. Motivation. Tools. Ever. Researchers in Japan have found that looking at pictures of cute things helped people perform their jobs faster.

Forget PowerPoint: It turns out the secret to improving productivity at your job might be puppies.

A new study out of Hiroshima University found that people performed a variety of tasks faster or more accurately after looking at pictures of kittens and puppies. These test subjects also beat out others who looked at pictures of adult animals or gourmet meals instead.

"Viewing cute images improved performance on tasks that required carefulness," researchers concluded. 

Earlier experiments found that people did a better job playing the game Operation after viewing photos of puppies and kittens. Researchers speculated that the cute images made subjects more attuned to being careful because baby animals suggest vulnerability.

"The perception of something as cute activates the idea of something delicate and breakable... valuable and worth caring for," said Gary Sherman, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and one of the authors of that earlier research.

The Hiroshima study, titled The Power of Kawaii (kawaii roughly translates to cute) found that the "cute factor" helped people performing other detail-oriented tasks, not just those involving fine motor skills.

So go ahead and hang that poster of a puppy asleep on a shoe in your cubicle. "If people had the inclination to surround themselves with cuteness in the office, I wouldn't discourage that," Sherman said.

"Cute objects may be used as an emotion elicitor to induce careful behavioral tendencies in specific situations, such as driving and office work," the study said.

The effect "seems to be more generalized" beyond only fine motor skills, Sherman said. "That does extend the domains and types of tasks that could be impacted."

This means anyone who has to do work that requires careful attention, such as copyediting or accounting, could benefit. So the next time your boss catches you perusing CuteOverload.com, tell them what looks like a kitten in a basket is really a performance-optimizing tool. 

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A hard-boiled news editor here at msnbc.com was recently amazed by the way the mood and sound of an entire newsroom changed when a baby appeared. Somebody brought the infant into the offices, and suddenly cooing, high-pitched voices, replaced the chatter and hum of reporters.

Which, naturally, led to a question: What’s up with that?

It’s not just squiggly, bright-eyed babes that can induce this reaction, but tiny baby clothes, or even non-human babies, like puppies and kittens. We all know we do this -- we’ve seen and heard it hundreds of times -- but why?

The short answer is that we like “cute.” Cute makes us feel good, and, in reaction, we want to approach whatever it is that’s cute, so we speak in higher voices, say gentle, soothing things, and are easily distracted from, say, reporting a story about politics or food safety.

In 1943, the famous ethologist Konrad Lorenz created a term he called “baby schema.” The baby schema is how a baby appears, with chubby cheeks; big, round eyes; soft chubby body; a head that seems far too big for its body. Babies are helpless. The only tool they have to motivate others to care for them is cuteness, and they wield the tool with amazing effect.

In 2009, a German-American team led by Melanie Glocker of the University of Muenster put adult women who had never given birth into an fMRI machine to look at their brains. They exposed the women to images of babies, and they manipulated the images to make the babies appear to be closer to, or further from, the ideal baby schema. (In other words, they uglied up the babies.)

The images that most adhered to the baby schema were deemed “cuter” by the women. All the images activated key brain regions involved in face processing and reward, especially the nucleus accumbens, a key reward region, but the higher the baby schema, the more powerful the accumbens activation. The cuter the baby, the better the women liked it, the more motivated they were to approach it. 

Other studies have shown that men react this way to babies, too, just not as powerfully as women. And one experiment showed that when adults looked at “very cute” images of puppies and kittens, or grown dogs and cats, those who looked at the puppies and kittens performed better on the kids’ game “Operation” indicating, the researchers said, that “human sensitivity to those possessing cute features may be an adaptation that facilitates caring for delicate human young.” 

In a fascinating study of how well cute sells, marketing researchers led by Curt Dommeyer of California State University Northridge, positioned themselves outside a Los Angeles grocery store and asked store patrons to stop and complete a survey about organ donation. Half the time, they displayed a picture of a baby boy dressed in a tiny tropical flower shirt on the table.

Without the picture, 26 percent of passersby agreed to complete the survey. With the picture, 49 percent did. A similar test, using a puppy this time, also got a higher response rate, though the difference wasn’t as big. In both tests, women were more likely to complete surveys than men, showing a stronger effect of cuteness on females.

No studies seem to have documented the raised voice pitch when we encounter babies, but it seems likely it’s the result of our brain’s motivating us to nurture. Evolution has wired our brains to be drawn in by cuteness which is why Knut, the baby polar bear, sparked nationwide love across Germany, while, say, the Hungerford’s Crawling Water Beetle goes unloved.     

Brian Alexander (www.BrianRAlexander.com) is co-author, with Larry Young PhD., of "The Chemistry Between Us: Love Sex and the Science of Attraction," (www.TheChemistryBetweenUs.com)  to be published Sept. 13.

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