This Is Your Brain on Puppies

This affliction has a name: “cute aggression.” And for the first time, researchers have begun to map what’s happening in our brains when we decide we want to chomp on a chubby baby leg (in a friendly way!). This over-the-top response might serve an important purpose: to ensure that those of us who experience cute aggression don’t spend so much time cooing at a baby or puppy that we forget to take care of it. When Katherine Stavropoulos, a professor at the University of California at Riverside, first became aware of a 2015 Yale University behavioral study identifying the phenomenon of cute aggression, she thought that finding its neurological basis might put scientists on a path toward better understanding the brain’s reward centers.