Admit it: babies are so cute that you can't help but pinch their cheeks.
Apparently, there might be a reason behind babies' cuteness. New research conducted by Oxford University suggests that babies - and even puppies - all evolved that way in order to survive.
Traits such as big eyes or chubby cheeks, as well as quirks such as giggling, are all designed to encourage other people to look after babies. Similar characteristics in animals also serve the same purpose, researchers said.
Attracting Caregivers
Oxford researchers looked into studies that examined the way cuteness affected the brain. These studies highlight the role of neural networks involved in care-giving.
Indeed, traits in both babies and animals evoke a caring response. Cuteness ignites fast privileged neural activity, and it is followed by slower processing in large brain networks that are involved in empathy and play. The brain networks are also linked to higher-order moral emotions.
Professor Morten Kringelbach of the university's psychiatry department says infants attract caregivers through the senses, making their cuteness one of the most basic yet powerful forces that shape our behavior around them.
What's more, cuteness in babies and puppies not only affects parents, but also those without their own children. It may be because the response induced by cuteness is fundamental in everyone, regardless of gender or status.
Kringelbach says their findings are the first to show that cuteness helps babies and puppies survive by eliciting caregiving.
He says care-giving cannot be reduced to simple and instinctual behaviors. Instead, it involves a complex choreography of careful, slow, deliberate and long-lasting social behaviors.
These ignite the fundamental pleasure systems in the brain that are also engaged when listening to music or eating food. In short, it always involves pleasant experiences, researchers said.
Incidentally, previous studies have shown that cute babies smile not only because they react to others, but because they want others to smile, too.
This was very apparent in the relationship between mothers and babies, suggesting that babies do not just smile randomly, but with an active agenda.
Limitations Of The Study
Are the findings of the new study discriminating? Researchers emphasized that it's not just the visual aspect that gives this effect, but the sounds and smells, too.
Unfortunately, babies with cleft palates and lips often face adverse outcomes in child development, authors wrote.
The problems could be traced to disruptions in mother-child relationship, meaning, mothers are less responsive to their babies because they are "less cute."
In the end, researchers emphasize that no baby can stay cute forever. They said the power of cuteness fades as the child grows older.
In the meantime, Kringelbach and his colleagues are currently investigating the long-term responses when caregivers become parents. Details of the new study are published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Photo: Jerry Lai | Flickr
