Chiharu bore a grudge against Aoi and confronted him on the school rooftop where he accidentally knocked off Aoi's eyepatch and was initially horrified by what he saw. There were significant correlations between participants’ self-report of behaviors related to cute aggression and ratings of cute aggression in the current study. such that more cute (baby) animals elicited a larger N200 than less cute (adult) animals, see Figure 1. In the face of emotions: event-related potentials in supraliminal and subliminal facial expression recognition.

g., larger eyes, fuller cheeks), and in the “less cute” condition they had less infantile characteristics (e. g., whether the relationship between N200 amplitude and cute aggression is mediated by feeling overwhelmed).

To measure feelings of caretaking, the average of the following statements was calculated: ‘I want to take care of it! Note that RewP amplitude was calculated by subtracting brain activity in the “less cute animals” condition from brain activity in response to the “more cute animals” condition. These serial mediation models underscore the complexity of cute aggression, and how it relates to a variety of both neural and behavioral measures (e. Prior to running mediation models, we explored the direct relationship between ERP components of interest (N200, RewP) and behavioral ratings of cute aggression.

There are a few potential reasons for this finding: task variability between the current study and previous work, and images not being sufficiently affective in content. cuteness) × 2 (hemisphere) × 2 (electrode position) repeated measures ANOVAs were run on animal and babies separately.

Because we wanted to explore brain activity in response to images, we utilized a within-subjects design in which all subjects viewed images from all conditions. we hypothesized that the relationship between caretaking and cute aggression would be serially mediated by appraisal and feeling overwhelmed. We were particularly interested in participants’ dimorphous expressions of positive emotions, which was measured by taking the average of the following three items (rated on a scale of 1–6): (1) ‘I cry while watching the happiest of moments of movies,’ (2) ‘When I am feeling strong positive emotions, I express with negative expressions,’ and (3) ‘When I am feeling a strong positive emotion (for example, extreme happiness, strong self of relief, strong feeling of connection to others etc. Participants were shown statements and asked to rate how much they agreed with each one on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1–2 representing, “not at all true,” 3–4 representing “a little bit true,” 5–6 representing “true,” 7–8 representing “very true,” and 9–10 representing “completely true.

Chiharu denies this, but Megumu says she can see it because she likes Aoi so she also wishes for the same thing. We hypothesized that amplitude of the N200 when viewing “more cute” pictures would relate to expressions of cute aggression either in mediation models or simple correlations. An aspiring author, Shino is deaf and therefore can only communicate through writing and sign language. Between each block of EEG stimuli, participants were asked to fill out rating scales related to their feelings about each block of pictures. We interpret this as a less robust difference between the two condition for babies compared to animals.Though our pictures were designed to elicit emotion, it would be unsurprising if these types of images elicit significantly weaker levels of emotion compared to explicit or violent images. Ventral striatal and medial prefrontal BOLD activation is correlated with reward-related electrocortical activity: a combined ERP and fMRI study.

The current study had four blocks of trials, each containing different images: more cute (baby) animals, less cute (adult) animals, more cute babies, less cute babies.We found a significant correlation between RewP amplitude for cute animals and behavioral ratings of cute aggression toward cute animals. Participants were recruited through the University of California, Riverside subject pool and from on-campus flyers.