If you're the kind to "Awwww so cute!" and get a little crazy when you see cute animals pictures, this article may interest you. Indeed, Rebecca Dyer and Oriana Aragon, students at Yale University, conducted some experiments to explain our reactions to these images...

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They first asked 109 volunteers to watch cute, funny and neutral images of animals and observed different reactions such as: "I can't contain myself", "It makes me want to say aww! "or "I want to squeeze something!"... The two students then noticed that people were more likely to want to press something and lose control of themselves when they are confronted to cute images than to funny or neutral images!

The young researchers then conducted a second experiment in which 90 new "testers" had at their disposal bubble wrap. At the end of the experiment, they counted the number of bubbles exploded depending on the type of slide shown: cute, funny or neutral. Result: 120 bubbles burst on average for each participant for the cute images, against 80 for funny pictures and 100 for neutral ones!

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Rebecca Dyer and Oriana Aragon arrived at an implacable conclusion: cute animals provoke a surplus of aggression and tension!

For them, this aggressiveness is in fact the result of frustration because we are unable to take care or cuddle the pets represented on the photos...

They also explained the aggressiveness by the fact we have to balance our emotional response to an excessive influx of positive thoughts provoked by the sight of these images!

So what do you think of these experiments? :)

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