This passage is excerpted from Hiroshi Nittono, Michiko Fukushima, Akihiro Yano, and Hiroki Moriya, “The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus,” ©2012 by Hiroshi Nittono, et al.
Cute things are popular worldwide. In particular, Japan’s
culture accepts and appreciates childishness at the social level.
Various kinds of anime and character goods, such as Pokémon
and Hello Kitty, which are often described as kawaii, are
produced and exported to many countries. This phenomenon
attracts considerable attention from various fields, including
aesthetics and engineering. Kawaii is an attributive adjective in
modern Japanese and is often translated into English as “cute.”
However, this word was originally an affective adjective
derived from an ancient word, kawa-hayu-shi, which literally
means face (kawa)-flushing (hayu-shi). The original meaning
of “ashamed, can’t bear to see, feel pity” was changed to “can’t
leave someone alone, care for.” In the present paper, we call
this affective feeling, typically elicited by babies, infants, and
young animals, cute.
Cute objects are assumed to be characterized by baby
schema. This is a set of features that are commonly seen in
young animals: a large head relative to the body size, a high
and protruding forehead, large eyes, and so forth. Lorenz
assumed that responses to baby schema are innate processes
and are triggered by elemental features of the stimuli. In
humans, the stimuli are deemed cute, capture attention, bring a
smile to the viewer’s face, and induce motivation and behavior
for approach and caregiving. Baby schema modulates
perception and attention at early stages of visual processing
and activates the reward system of the brain. From an
ethological perspective, it is understandable that cute things are
treated favorably. However, little is known about whether
encountering a cute object influences the subsequent behavior
of the beholder. Because cute things produce positive feelings,
their influence may extend to other aspects of behavior.
Sherman, Haidt, and Coan reported two experiments
showing that performance in a fine motor dexterity task (the
children’s game Operation) improved after participants viewed
a slide show of cute images (e.g., puppies and kittens) more
than after they viewed images that were not as cute (e.g., dogs
and cats). The performance measure was the number of plastic
body parts that participants removed successfully from the
body of the patient depicted on the game board using tweezers
without touching the edges of the compartments. The
improvement in the accuracy of this task can be interpreted as
an index of increased attention to and control of motor actions.
Sherman et al. explained this effect in terms of the embodied
cognition perspective. That is, the tenderness elicited by cute
images is more than just a positive affective feeling state. It can
make people more physically tender in their motor behavior.
Although the results are intriguing, the mechanism of
performance improvement remains unclear for two reasons.
First, the time to complete the task was not measured. Better
performance could be achieved either through slow and
deliberate actions or through quick and accurate actions.
Measuring the performance speed would help to explain the
underlying mechanism. Second, only one type of task was
used. If viewing baby animals induced a behavioral tendency
toward protection and caregiving, performance improvement
could be specific to a care-related task. The operation task used
by Sherman et al. suggests caregiving because the player is
expected to act as a doctor who helps the patient depicted on
the game board with removing foreign objects from the
patient’s body. Using different types of tasks would elucidate
the cause of performance improvement.
Recently, Sherman and Haidt challenged the classic view
that cuteness is an innate releaser of parental instincts and
caregiving responses. Instead, they proposed that perceiving
cuteness motivates social engagement and primes affiliative,
friendly tendencies. This attitudinal change is assumed to be
linked with cognitive processes related to mentalizing (i.e.,
attributing mental states to agents) and sometimes indirectly
leads to increased cares. If cuteness-induced behavioral
carefulness is caused by a heightened motivation for social
interaction, the effect would not be found in simple perceptual–
cognitive tasks that do not suggest social interaction.
Cute things are popular worldwide. In particular, Japan’s
culture accepts and appreciates childishness at the social level.
Various kinds of anime and character goods, such as Pokémon
and Hello Kitty, which are often described as kawaii, are
produced and exported to many countries. This phenomenon
attracts considerable attention from various fields, including
aesthetics and engineering. Kawaii is an attributive adjective in
modern Japanese and is often translated into English as “cute.”
However, this word was originally an affective adjective
derived from an ancient word, kawa-hayu-shi, which literally
means face (kawa)-flushing (hayu-shi). The original meaning
of “ashamed, can’t bear to see, feel pity” was changed to “can’t
leave someone alone, care for.” In the present paper, we call
this affective feeling, typically elicited by babies, infants, and
young animals, cute.
Cute objects are assumed to be characterized by baby
schema. This is a set of features that are commonly seen in
young animals: a large head relative to the body size, a high
and protruding forehead, large eyes, and so forth. Lorenz
assumed that responses to baby schema are innate processes
and are triggered by elemental features of the stimuli. In
humans, the stimuli are deemed cute, capture attention, bring a
smile to the viewer’s face, and induce motivation and behavior
for approach and caregiving. Baby schema modulates
perception and attention at early stages of visual processing
and activates the reward system of the brain. From an
ethological perspective, it is understandable that cute things are
treated favorably. However, little is known about whether
encountering a cute object influences the subsequent behavior
of the beholder. Because cute things produce positive feelings,
their influence may extend to other aspects of behavior.
Sherman, Haidt, and Coan reported two experiments
showing that performance in a fine motor dexterity task (the
children’s game Operation) improved after participants viewed
a slide show of cute images (e.g., puppies and kittens) more
than after they viewed images that were not as cute (e.g., dogs
and cats). The performance measure was the number of plastic
body parts that participants removed successfully from the
body of the patient depicted on the game board using tweezers
without touching the edges of the compartments. The
improvement in the accuracy of this task can be interpreted as
an index of increased attention to and control of motor actions.
Sherman et al. explained this effect in terms of the embodied
cognition perspective. That is, the tenderness elicited by cute
images is more than just a positive affective feeling state. It can
make people more physically tender in their motor behavior.
Although the results are intriguing, the mechanism of
performance improvement remains unclear for two reasons.
First, the time to complete the task was not measured. Better
performance could be achieved either through slow and
deliberate actions or through quick and accurate actions.
Measuring the performance speed would help to explain the
underlying mechanism. Second, only one type of task was
used. If viewing baby animals induced a behavioral tendency
toward protection and caregiving, performance improvement
could be specific to a care-related task. The operation task used
by Sherman et al. suggests caregiving because the player is
expected to act as a doctor who helps the patient depicted on
the game board with removing foreign objects from the
patient’s body. Using different types of tasks would elucidate
the cause of performance improvement.
Recently, Sherman and Haidt challenged the classic view
that cuteness is an innate releaser of parental instincts and
caregiving responses. Instead, they proposed that perceiving
cuteness motivates social engagement and primes affiliative,
friendly tendencies. This attitudinal change is assumed to be
linked with cognitive processes related to mentalizing (i.e.,
attributing mental states to agents) and sometimes indirectly
leads to increased cares. If cuteness-induced behavioral
carefulness is caused by a heightened motivation for social
interaction, the effect would not be found in simple perceptual–
cognitive tasks that do not suggest social interaction.