Japan’s special take on cute is unique enough that we even borrow the word “kawaii” in English to talk about it. But although there is some cultural variation in the details, cute is very much a universal concept, and you might be surprised at the fundamental role it plays in human psychology.

What is Cute, Exactly?

What makes something cute? Think about how characters and toys based on animals look compared to their real-life counterparts. Compare the bear above to this teddy bear:

Or take our friend the ubiquitous tanuki statue and his wild cousin:

…versus…

What are the differences? The snouts are shorter (in some teddy bears it’s gone, or close to it). The head and eyes are big and round. The legs are stubby and rounder and generally, everything is softer and more rounded than in real life.

But why are these the particular features that turn a dangerous animal that could bite your head off, like a bear, into something that makes us go “awwwwwww”? Scientists have actually thought about this subject, starting with the zoologist and ethologist Konrad Lorenz in the 1940s.

Lorenz proposed that the features that make up “cute” are all characteristic of human infants. We coo and squeal at the sight of heads that are large for their bodies, little button noses, and chubby, soft bodies. It also doesn’t hurt if the critter has a floppy, clumsy gait like a human toddler.

Basically, the more a a cartoon character or animal is like a human baby, the cuter it is. One interesting thing that shows this is the importance of round forward-facing eyes like humans have. An animal with eyes on the front of its face, like a panda, looks cuter to us than one with eyes on the sides of its head, like a horse. (If you don’t believe it, check out the next photo, which shows that if you want to turn a a horse into something absolutely horrifyingly cute, you move its eyes to the front of its face.)

Why The Short Face?

Lorenz theorized that there’s an evolutionary reason that these characteristics make you want to grab something and cuddle it. Human babies need a lot of care. If you’re a giraffe, your baby can stand up and run within moments of birth. If you’re a frog, you dump a whole bunch of eggs somewhere and get on with your life, figuring at least one of your hundreds of offspring will manage to survive on its own. But if you’re a human, your baby needs constant attention for months.

So the reason we go “awwww” in response to babies has an obvious evolutionary explanation: the people who reacted that way to round, soft creatures with big heads had babies that survived better. Those babies grew up to have more babies, and passed on the genes for wanting to cuddle things that look that way. On the other hand, the people who didn’t react that way to cute features would be more likely to leave their babies lying around in dangerous places, forget to feed them, etc. So resistance to cuteness would tend to eliminate itself from the gene pool.

This response is now so ingrained in our brains that we react the same way even when it has no evolutionary advantage to our species. We’re just as smitten by pandas as by human infants, despite the fact that they have no benefit to the survival of the human race whatsover. And we even create stuff that has those features, like Hello Kitty, sewage-treatment-plant mascots, and teddy bears. So if you’re one of those people who thinks all that cute stuff is stupid? Blame it on the babies.

This Is Your Brain On Cute

Psychologists have actually experimentally tested Lorenz’s theory that those specific features of “cute” result in a care-giving impulse. One study, for example, manipulated photos of real babies to make their heads more or less round, etc, and found that photos with more of those characteristics were rated as cuter, and made subjects feel more strongly that they wanted to care for them.

But research has also shown that cuteness has other effects – both positive and negative.

There’s one recent study out of Japan that’s probably going to be good news for everyone reading this. You’re on the Internet, so the odds are high that you spend some of your time at work looking at photos and videos of cats – or, if you’re not a cat fan, of whatever other cute animal floats your boat.

No doubt you try to hide this apparently time-wasting behavior, but instead, maybe you should send your boss a link to this article titled The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus. The research reported shows that looking at pictures of cute animals might actually help you to do your work better.

Two different kinds of tasks were used in the experiment. One was a game called Bilibili Dr. Game which is like the American game Operation. If you’ve never played, it’s a game where you have to remove very tiny body parts from very small openings on a “patient”, using very tiny tweezers.

The subjects played the game, and then they were shown photos: Either of dogs and cats, or of cute puppies and kittens. Then they played the game again, and the people who saw puppies and kittens got better scores the second time around. They also took longer to play the game, so the researchers concluded that seeing cute animals made them do their work more deliberately and carefully.

If your job doesn’t involve the same kind of fine motor control as the game of Operation, you may think this study won’t convince your boss to count looking at Cute Overload as work. Never fear! The experimenters also used another task, which involved looking for certain numbers in a large matrix.

Subjects also did better on this task after looking at photos of puppies and kittens, so the researchers concluded that cute animals made people more attentive. And there’s no job that doesn’t benefit from careful attention, right? So surf away for the those cute kitties.

Cute: The Dark Side

Other research has shown that the effect of cuteness isn’t always so benign. If you’ve ever told a baby that it was so cute you wanted to eat it up, you’ve experienced the effect studied in another recent study: cute animals actually make people feel more aggressive.

Subjects were shown a slideshow including cute baby animals, animals in silly situations, and “neutral” adult animals. One group was asked to rate how much the photos made them want to squeeze something or give an aggressive “want to eat it up” sort of response. The cute pictures made them feel that way more often. Then, another group actually put their money where their mouth was: they were popping bubble wrap while watching the slideshow. They popped an average of 120 bubbles when looking at the cute photos, compared to 100 for neutral ones and 80 for the silly ones.

Cute Clouds The Mind

Maybe being more aggressive at popping bubble wrap seems like no big risk, but there are lots of real-life situations where our uncontrollable response to cuteness affects our judgement about important matters.

For example, you probably wouldn’t hesitate to walk right up to a cute little Chihuahua and pet it, while you might cross the street to avoid a big dog. Turns out you’ve got it exactly backwards. There are fashions in what breeds are considered dangerous, but from German shepherds in the 1960s through Rottweilers and Dobermans to pit bulls nowadays, the breeds considered dangerous are always large ones. But the truth is, as this study showed, the dogs that are most aggressive towards humans are cute little guys: Dachshunds, Chihuahuas and Jack Russell Terriers.

Even professionals who work with animals are not immune to the bad influence of cuteness. A paper in the journal Conservation Biology showed that cute animals are much more likely to be studied by scientists and to get funding for their conservation. Apparently even scientists aren’t attracted to animals because they’re important to their ecosystems or more endangered: it’s more important that they be fuzzy, with 500 times more published studies on large furry mammals than on slimy little amphibians.

Cute animals also cloud our judgment about our fellow humans. An experiment in France found that women were three times more likely to give a guy their phone number if he was walking a cute dog, and another showed that a panhandler more than doubled his income when he had a dog.

So if you always considered “cute” to practically equal “harmless,” maybe you better think again. I have to wonder, how many other ways is cute messing with our minds that science hasn’t found out about yet? How is this affecting the psychology Japan, the “Kingdom of Cute”? Will they all just one day snap and eat each other up?

You know, that Hello Kitty…. I always thought there was something a little sinister about her. Now I know why.

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Additional Reference:

• New York Times: The Cute Factor

These beliefs aren’t all bad news, but I’m also not persuaded that if you’re pregnant and you want to have a girl, you should get your husband to eat bananas or that it’s good luck if your first dream of the new year is about eggplant (along with Mount Fuji and a hawk, because hey, why not?)

But apparently some of this folklore might not be completely off the mark. The idea that eating eel is good for you in hot weather might actually have some validity: it’s high in vitamin B1, which is lost in sweat. And some of it’s actually not totally unfamiliar: In just about every country ever, people believe that there’s always room for dessert, and that eating that dessert – or another snack – at bedtime makes it even more fattening.

It’s curious that these two beliefs are shared by different cultures, including the US and Japan. Are we both equally nuts? Or, just maybe, could this mean that there’s something to these notions? This is pretty important to me, because while I could easily go my whole life without eating eel and fried melon together, I eat a LOT of snacks and sweets. I dream about baked goods. I plan my trips to Japan around where I can get black sesame ice cream. So these are vitally important questions.

Well, fortunately for me, and those of you who are similarly obsessed, Japanese science is on the case. And so is Japanese science TV, which really gets the idea of “News You Can Use.” For a few years, NHK had a program called the Kaitai Shin Show (translated as The New Anatomy Show) and in the two episodes that I’ve lovingly preserved via DVR, they examined these two beliefs, with important results for your snacking life.

There’s Always Room for Jello, or Strawberry Cream Cake

English-speakers often jokingly say that dessert goes into a second stomach. And in Japanese there’s a word for it: betsubara. (It’s a combination of “betsu” meaning “other,” and “hara” meaning belly, with [h] changing to [b] as it does in the case of rendaku.)

Of course we don’t literally have more than one stomach like a cow, but as a metaphor, it sure seems accurate. Even if you’re so stuffed that you can’t fit one more bite of dinner, somehow, you can still eat something sweet afterwards.

One Japanese gastroenterologist, Shigeki Koyama, realized that he could actually test this belief, and his experiment was re-created for the television show. Two women volunteers got into their hospital pajamas and ate a several-course French chef cooked meal brought in specially for the purpose. A tough job, no doubt, but someone had to do it – as the narrator so wisely explained, “We can only find out if we have special room for dessert if we’re full.”

One woman raised her hand when she felt full and was led into an MRI machine, where her totally packed stomach was easily seen on the screen. Then, the moment of truth: she looked at a big piece of cake.

The MRI image (reproduced above) clearly showed that the shape of her stomach changed – it became narrower – and started pulsing at the opening to the intestines. Merely looking at the cake was enough to cause the stomach to make more room by pushing food out of itself.

The second volunteer’s stomach acted a little differently, but still made room: When she had finished her dinner there was a tiny empty space in her stomach on the MRI, and after she looked at the cake, the image showed that it had gotten bigger.

The Science of Betsubara

Back in the studio, professor Takashi Yamamoto of Kio University explained that it’s not the stomach that tells us when we’re full – it’s the brain. When the stomach is full, blood sugar rises, which makes the satiety center of the brain say “stop eating” (or if your brain is Japanese as the one in the diagram on the show, “Taberuna!“) .

So how does just a glance at cake change this? There’s another part of the brain that releases beta endorphins, which cause excitement and euphoria – and the desire to eat cake, which, of course, is one of life’s most reliable, exciting, and euphoric experiences.

Then, this also triggers the release of dopamine. These chemicals together stimulate the feeding center of the brain, which yells TABERU!, and drowns out the satiety center, which is trying to tell you that you should stop now. What’s more, the feeding center secretes orexin, which moves food into the intestines, making room for the cake, exactly as the MRI images showed. Sweets bring out more beta endorphin than other tastes, which is why, say, salty rice crackers don’t have the same effect as dessert.

Bad News for the Ladies

Do women really like sweets more than men? Unfortunately there’s apparently some truth to this stereotype. Females are more sensitive to beta endorphin than males, so their effect in making you want the cake is stronger. And another study, with rats, showed that when given unlimited access to sugar water, female lab rats would drink twice as much over a 24 hours period as males.

The professor explained that this is due to the fact that female hormones have many roles, including allowing us to put on more fat. Great. Thanks a lot, nature.

Do Bedtime Snacks Make You Fat?

Studying the betsubara effect called for high tech equipment, but the next experiment is so gloriously simple that with enough self-discipline you could do it at home. In a study conducted in 1993, seven women in Okinawa were somehow persuaded to eat the exact same meal three times a day for ten days, at 7:30, 12:30, and 6:00. At the end of the period, all seven had lost weight.

Then, they ate the same meals for another ten days, but now, dinnertime was changed from 6:00 to 10:00. At the end of the second ten days, despite eating the exact same food with the exact same number of calories, all seven women had gained weight.

Bedtime Snacks Vs. Afternoon Tea

This is a pretty mind-boggling result. How could the same number of calories make you fatter simply because they’re eaten at a different time of day? An obvious possibility is that going to bed right after eating means you don’t get a chance to burn the calories. But that’s not it, as Professor Shigeki Shimba of Nihon University explained. It’s because there’s a protein in your body that controls accumulation of fats in cells, and it varies in amount according to the time of day.

When there’s more of this protein, called BMAL1, cells can take in more fat. What the research found is that the amount of BMAL1 is lowest at 3 PM, and four times higher at 11 PM.

So there’s bad news and good news. The bad news is that bedtime snacks really are more fattening: that’s a time when your cells are going to store more fat from whatever you eat. The good news is: you can have afternoon tea instead! 3 PM is the best time to trick your body into storing the least possible fat from a snack.

Don’t Be Ruled By Your Stomach Clock

The bedtime snack habit can be hard to break, because some people say that they need their treat to get to sleep. They’re not just whining, according to Shigenobu Shibata, professor of the incredibly cool field of Chronobiology at Waseda University. You can even show the same effect with rats: lab rats were fed at bedtime with an automatic feeder and after a few days, they couldn’t fall asleep without it.

Why? You’ve probably heard that your body has a biological clock, but it turns out, there’s actually two: one in your brain, and one in your stomach. Normally they’re synchronized, but you can get them out of synch by eating bedtime snacks. Then, as in the betsubara effect, you’ve got another argument between yelling body parts: The biological clock in your brain is trying to tell you to sleep, but the stomach clock, sure that it’s nowhere near bedtime, drowns it out.

Fortunately, it’s easy to reset the stomach clock: it’s entirely determined by what time you get up and eat breakfast. Bedtime snackers who need the snack to sleep are usually also those who skip breakfast. So, get up and eat a good breakfast and you should be on your way to re-setting the stomach clock and giving up that fattening bedtime treat. And then you can thank Japanese science – and Japanese TV – for your new, svelte, afternoon-tea-eating self.

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Gifu man, 71, sues NHK for distress over its excess use of foreign words: As we’ve written about before, Japanese is full of loan words, even if they don’t always make sense. Given that, it’s a little confusing that a man in Japan is suing the NHK for causing him emotional distress by using too many foreign words. After looking at some of the awful names of NHK programs, like BSコンシェルジュ (“BS Concierge”), I can’t say I blame him. Can I get in on this lawsuit too?

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President of KFC Japan buys Colonel Sanders’ trademark white suit at auction for $21K

Over the years, KFC has become almost as Japanese as it is American. Between KFC’s presence throughout the country and the Curse of Colonel Sanders that plagued Osaka for decades, the F in KFC might as well stand for フライド. With that in mind, it seems fitting that the president of KFC Japan, Masao Watanabe, outbid all others to win the Colonel’s iconic white suit, complete with black bolo tie. Will Watanabe also inherit Sanders’ ability to curse Japanese baseball teams? Only time will tell. [via News On Japan]

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Court Hears Arguments on Whaling by Japan: Despite being one of many countries that hunts and eats whale Japan has, in many ways, become the symbol of whaling in the world. Now, Japan and Australia are going toe-to-toe at the highest international court: the UN’s International Court of Justice at the Hague. What will be the outcome? It’s hard to say, but Japan probably shouldn’t bribe judges with delicious, delicious whale meat.

Cloned mice produced from drop of blood: Cloning has been one of those futuristic conepts like flying cars and humanoid robots that’s long existed in science fiction, but hasn’t ever become practical enough for everyday life. It looks like cloning has gotten closer to a practical application as scientists in Japan have clone normal, healthy mice from a single drop of blood. Finally, a way to produce more mice.

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Sprint Shareholders Approve Sale to SoftBank: Japanese telecommunications giant made a huge move last year when it offered to buy American company sprint, but the deal has been tied up in various bureaucratic processes. The deal cleared another hurdle Tuesday when Sprint shareholder approved the deal, leaving the FCC to assess the transaction. Presumably, Sprint will provide SoftBank with uniquely American assets—like built-in NSA spying features!

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[threecol_two]Japanese chef discusses abduction issue, ramen with Kim Jong Un : Kenji Fujimoto, Kim Jong Il’s former chef (who we’ve written about before), is apparently still on good terms with the dictator family of North Korea. Despite tricking Kim Jong Il and writing a tell-all book about the Kim family, Fujimoto was literally welcomed back into North Korea with open arms. This emotional moment between Kim Jong-Un and Fujimoto was, of course, followed by hundreds of North Koreans dressed in bright costumes dancing in sync to patriotic music. 강성대국! [via News On Japan][/threecol_two] [threecol_one_last]Doraemon’s -100^th Birthday: This week Japanese icon Doraemon, the time-travelling robotic cat that’s starred in manga and anime for over 50 years, celebrated his birthday. Well, kind of; the fictional hero will be born on September 3, 2112, making this past week’s birthday his -100^th. People celebrated the occasion with tribute videos, and by even declaring the fictional cat as an official citizen. Here’s to another -100 years! Wait.

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[threecol_one]The End of a 1,400-Year-Old Business: As an American, it’s strange to me to think that there are companies that have been around longer than my country, but that’s the case in a lot of countries around the world. Unfortunately being really, really old doesn’t protect you from things like bankruptcy. At the very least, they can say that they had a pretty good run.

Why does this Japanese woman send more tweets to Pres. Obama than anyone else in the world?: You’d think that US President Barack Obama would get his fair share of spam on Twitter from political enemies and Horse_ebooks, but apparently the person who tweets @BarackObama the most is a Japanese woman concerned about a free trade agreement. She’s certainly inspired me to tweet at the Japanese Prime Minister to dub Hard Gay a Living National Treasure.[/threecol_two_last]

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But surprisingly, both conventional wisdom and modern science tells us that that is completely wrong. Being smart is nice and all, but it turns out success is less about brains and more about hard work and perseverance.

Being Smart Isn’t Everything

I just finished reading Outliers, a book that takes a look at what makes people successful. A lot of the book is debunking myths about success, including the myth that smart people are successful just because they’re smart.

Outliers looks at tons of different people with high IQs, including the man who most people say has the highest IQ in the world, Christopher Langan.

But what we find out is that the people with high IQs weren’t universally successful. In fact, a study that followed several high IQ people from childhood into adulthood found that they were just as likely to fail as anybody else.

Just because these people did great on IQ and other standardized tests doesn’t mean that their intelligence translated into success in other pursuits.

Success is the result of many different factors. A lot of it is environment (which is something that everybody has some control over), but some of it is mindset and hard work, too.

And, I’d argue, it’s sometimes even good to look stupid in order to succeed.

Looking Dumb Is Good

If you’re a long-time Tofugu reader, then you probably recognize this common piece of Koichi advice: when learning Japanese, make mistakes.

It seems counter-intuitive; generally, you want to look smart, or at least like you know what you’re doing. But screwing up and looking like a moron is actually one of the most useful things you can do when learning Japanese (or anything for that matter).

Speak Japanese like an idiot, use the wrong kanji, and butcher pronunciation. Anything goes as long as you learn from it. You don’t want to look like a total dweeb for absolutely no reason.

This comes up time and time again in our posts about learning Japanese, and was even important enough to make it to the top of Koichi’s “10 Things I Wish I Knew About Japanese Learning When I Was First Starting Out.”

In the words of the immortal Bob Ross: “we don’t have mistakes, just happy accidents.”

The Science Behind A Good Mindset

The idea that making mistakes to learn is a fairly old idea, but what is new is the science behind it.

Scientists are always doing new studies that look at why people behave the way they do; whether it’s social factors, environment, biology, or some combination of the three.

Last week, I read on Wired about a recent psychological study that tried to figure out why some people learn from more from their mistakes than other people.

I’m not going to get too detailed about how the study was conducted (mostly because I’d be lying to you if I pretended to know anything about psychology), but the results were interesting.

Researchers divided subjects into two groups of people: those with a “growth” mindset, who believed that they could learn more and get better at almost anything if they tried hard enough; and people with a “fixed” mindset, who believed that they couldn’t really learn much more than they already knew.

When people with a “growth” mindset made a mistake, their brains became more attentive and alert, and their likelihood of learning from and correcting their mistakes shot up. People with a “fixed” mindset, on the other hand, were less likely to learn and correct their mistakes.

Again, these people didn’t succeed because they have 150 IQ; their ability to learn from their mistakes came from a mindset, and attitude.

These people thought that they were able to learn more and, because of that attitude, they were actually able to. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Applying This To Japanese Learning

What this really all boils down to is that you don’t need to be a card-carrying, Mensa-certified genius to learn Japanese.

Sure, some people might have an advantage or two when first starting out; but in the long run, a good state of mind trumps virtually all else. Your mentality can be your greatest asset, more so than a high IQ. Attitude is everything.

And then there’s Japan. Drinking is a huge part of Japanese culture; whether it’s going out to a bar with your friends, or hitting an izakaya with your coworkers, it’s hard to find a social occasion that doesn’t involve kicking back a few cold ones.

But there are also plenty of problems with alcohol in Japan. Today, Japan chugs down 6 times more booze than they did 50 years ago. The crown prince of the Japanese royal family had to be treated for alcoholism, and a few years ago, the Japanese finance minister held a press conference drunk:

Maybe nobody is more notorious for not being able to hold their alcohol than Japanese salarymen. Just a couple of beers (even light, watery Japanese beers) send salarymen stumbling down city streets late at night, neckties around their foreheads, faces beet-red.

You might think that salarymen are wusses or lightweights for getting drunk so easily, but there is actually a scientific explanation behind why the Japanese can’t always hold their liquor.

Drunken Science

A big reason so many Japanese have trouble with alcohol is because of a condition called the “alcohol flush reaction,” (or “Asian glow”). It’s a genetic condition that affects something like ⅓ of all East Asian people.

What does this Asian glow do to people? In a nutshell, it means that the body can’t break down alcohol all the way, causing even light drinking to result in really bad hangovers and bright red faces (hence the name “Asian glow”).

For relaxing times...

But besides the obvious, visible effects of alcohol on those who have the Asian glow, there are other things going on beneath the surface, chemical reactions within the body.

Japanese Mutants

Typically when somebody drinks alcohol, it’s processed by the body in two basic steps. First, alcohol is broken down into a harsh chemical, then into a milder chemical that’s basically vinegar.

The enzyme in your body that makes that important second step happen called aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH).  ALDH makes sure that alcohol is only in that harsh chemical form for a little bit of time.

But for some reason, about 40-45% of Japanese people are mutants.

No, not cool kind of mutants, but the regular ol’ boring kind. These people have a different kind of ALDH (called ALDH2) that doesn’t break down the alcohol as well nor as fast, leaving the alcohol in the body at that harsh chemical state for longer.

So while people with the Asian glow might not be able to shoot lasers out of their eyes or have Adamantium claws (they’re only Vibranium), this mutation is still pretty important, especially in a culture where drinking is so prominent.

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