Kindchenschema

Kindchenschema, translated into English as baby schema, refers to a specific set of infantile physical features, including a relatively large head and forehead compared with the rest of the body, big eyes set low on the face, chubby round cheeks, a small nose and mouth, short thick limbs, and a soft, plump overall body shape, that people across cultures reliably perceive as cute and that automatically motivates caretaking and nurturing behavior toward whoever displays them. The Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz first proposed the concept in 1943, describing it as an innate releasing mechanism, a built-in perceptual trigger that evolved to promote effective caregiving toward helpless human infants and thereby improve their odds of survival. Numerous later studies have confirmed that faces exhibiting a stronger set of these baby-schema features are consistently rated as cuter and more attractive than faces with weaker versions of the same features, and brain imaging research has found that viewing strongly baby-schema faces activates reward-related regions of the adult brain, including in women who have not yet had children of their own. Because the underlying features are not unique to humans, the same cuteness response and motivation to care for the animal has also been documented transferring across species, so that puppies, kittens and other young animals bearing similar large-eyed, round-faced proportions elicit a comparable caretaking response in human observers.