Aww: The Emotion of Perceiving Cuteness

Emotions are one of the core components of human biology and behavior, linking senses, thoughts, and actions. In particular, emotions are one of the main components of human communications, including: facial expressions, postures and body language, pheromones and chemosignals, non-linguistic vocalizations, and spoken language Some of these distinctions are very subtle, and we use languages to communicate those subtleties to each other. For example, the emotion of fear is heavily studied (Buckley, 2016; Méndez-Bértolo et al., 2016), and there is a large family of English words related to the concept. so on; adjectives describing either the source of fear or the person experiencing it, such as frightful or fearful; and adverbs and derived nouns, such as frighteningly and fearfulness. As in many aspects of human communications, there are sometimes subtle cultural distinctions in the terminologies of communications. Kundera (1980), for example, argues that there is no exact English equivalent for the Czech word litost, a particular category of sadness. In general, however, there is a substantial degree of correspondence, between most modern languages, in the linguistic taxonomies of emotional constructs. There is, however, one surprising omission. Across a number of major language groups, there are words for cute and cuteness, but no words for the human emotion experienced on perceiving cuteness. Terms such as kawaii in Japanese, or mignon in French, are sufficiently well-known to be adopted across cultures and languages. Indeed, the concept of kawaii includes an entire lexicon of associated subterms such as mori, loli, kei, and decora, which describe styles, fashions and personalities. There are terms for cute across languages with very different roots; moni in Spanish, sudara in Punjabi, ke ai in Chinese. None of the languages listed above, however, contain a single term for the corresponding emotional response. Kawaii may translate as loveable, but love is not the emotion of cuteness, in the same way that happiness is not the same as awe (Coghlan et al., 2012; Darbor et al., 2015). Research in this field is forced to use portmanteau terms such as cute-emotion, cute-affect, or kawaii-feeling In popular English, cute-emotion is represented by vocalizations such as aww or d'aww. Aww is listed in UK-English dictionaries, but only as an exclamation, not a noun. Indeed, there is remarkably little published research on this emotion, relative to other human emotions. There are >1000 research publications on emotions such as fear (Buckley, 2016; Méndez-Bértolo et al., 2016), …