We know your deepest, darkest secret.

Whenever you look at something cute — a neighbor’s puppy, a newborn baby, your roommate’s cat — you get the urge to bite it.

Believe it or not, researchers have actually documented this phenomenon. (Are they, like, running out of things to study? The study was conducted at Yale, no less.) Known as “cute aggression,” apparently it’s totally normal.

Looks like you’re not a total weirdo.

Cute aggression is when people feel a destructive urge — usually to eat or squeeze — when they see something adorable, such as a kitten or a baby.

Wait a minute. “Cute” and “aggressive” go together now?

According to graduate psychology students Rebecca Dyer and Oriana Aragon, yes they do. The pair were interested in the topic and decided to conduct a few studies to try to see what this strange phenomenon was all about.

In their first study, more than 100 participants scrolled through “funny,” “neutral,” and “cute” images of animals. The “funny” pictures always had a silly element — for example, a puppy falling as it chases a tennis ball. “Neutral” images were typically of older, more chill dogs. And “cute” pictures emphasized the features we typically go ga-ga over, such as “puppy eyes.”

Participants rated each picture according to its cuteness level. But they also rated their own loss of control by choosing statements such as “I can’t handle it” and “I want to squeeze it.”

The results showed that pictures that received high cuteness ranking were also more likely to elicit self-reported “loss of control.”

Does cuteness ever lead to actual aggression?

If you’ve ever held a newborn and had to stop yourself from squeezing it, you know that cuteness overload can lead to light aggression.

Dyer and Aragon looked into this element of cute aggression, too. In a second study, they asked male and female participants to hold a piece of bubble wrap while they scrolled through images similar to those in the previous study.

The funny pictures elicited an average of 80 “popped” bubbled and neutral pictures caused 100 pops, on average. However, when faced with cute photos, participants popped a whopping average of 120 bubbles.

Notice a trend, here?

Sure. But why does it happen?

Researchers can’t fully explain the mechanism behind the urge.

Biological anthropologist Gwen Dewar has documented our desire to nibble cute babies. In a recent study, she used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor the brain activity of women exposed to different scents.

One scent was a placebo of air. The other scent had been collected from the cotton onesies of newborn babies. (For some of us, simply reading that might be enough to generate a "cute aggression" response.) In both cases, the women weren’t told what they were smelling.

The fMRI results showed that the baby scent lit up the brain’s reward center, sending a rush of dopamine not unlike the chain reaction that occurs when we eat something delicious.

So, the specific urge to “bite” cute things might be a case of getting our wires crossed. The physiological experience is similar to what we experience when we’re exposed to food, and so we feel like biting.

But that doesn’t explain other seemingly related aggressive urges, such as squeezing. Dyer suggests that both feelings might simply be our way of dealing with overly positive emotions — much in the same way that we cry when we’re happy.

So the next time someone gives you a weird look when you tell them you just want to eat their baby, all you have to do is explain how totally normal it is. And, of course, don’t bite their baby.

_{[Image via Shutterstock]}