Aww: the emotion of perceiving cuteness

Abstract

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 (Lambie, 2009; Niedenthal and Brauer, 2012; Dehaene, 2014; Van den Stock and de Gelder, 2014; Lench et al., 2015; Ekman, 2016; Haviland-Jones et al., 2016; Martinez et al., 2016).

Neurophysiologists analyse human emotions as complex interlinked continua of neurological and hormonal signals and processes (Dehaene, 2014; Etkin et al., 2015; Bray, 2016). The social sciences, however, rely on the subtleties of language to differentiate and communicate the fine distinctions between closely related emotions (Johnson-Laird and Oatley, 1989; Ekman, 2016; Lakoff, 2016; Tissari, 2016). Some of these distinctions are very subtle, and we use languages to communicate those subtleties to each other.