The next time your boss catches you browsing LOLCats, you now have an excuse: you're improving your job performance. According to a study recently published by Hiroshima University, looking at cute images of puppies and kittens can enhance concentration and promote more careful behavior.
Called The Power of Kawaii (“cute” in Japanese), the study compared performance of tasks before and after viewing pictures of puppies and kittens vs. neutral images. The result: puppies and kittens rule.
What is cute, exactly? Researchers defined it as "a set of features that are commonly seen in young animals: a large head relative to body size, a high and protruding forehead, large eyes, and so forth." Human babies (and Hello Kitty, Pokemon and other anime characters) share the same characteristics. All "capture attention, bring a smile to the viewer’s face and induce motivation and behavior for approach and caregiving."
To test the theory, researchers gave 132 participants one of three tasks: using tweezers to remove small pieces from slots in the Japanese equivalent of the board game Operation, counting the appearances of a digit in a block of numbers, and a reaction time test. After the first round of the task, each participant viewed a set of photos (puppies and kittens, adult dogs and cats or “neutral” images of foods such as sushi or pasta) before returning to the original task.
The performance of those who viewed the pictures of baby animals improved by as much as 44 percent in the second round, compared to virtually zero for those who viewed the other images.
Who knows? Maybe soon the kawaii break will replace the coffee break, and people will finally stop making fun of Shirley with the cubicle plastered with cat pictures.
Click on the slide show if you want to try it out yourself.
To see the original study, click here.
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