Ever find yourself feeling compelled to squeeze a cute animal a little too tight, or to pinch the cheeks of a baby a little too hard?
Don’t worry; it’s not a sign that you’re a sadist. According to psychologist Dr. Julia Shaw, it’s a perfectly normal human reaction, and doesn’t mean you’ve got dark thoughts hiding in the depths of your mind.
“It’s actually called a dimorphous display of emotion,” Shaw, who’s known for her work in criminal psychology, told CTV’s Your Morning. “When you feel one emotion very strongly your brain pumps out the opposite feeling to make sure your brain doesn’t overload.”
It’s the same process that makes people cry at happy events like weddings or laugh at sad events like funerals, she says.
The phenomenon has long been theorized, but a study released in December of 2018 was the first to find a neural basis for the reaction.
The study’s authors theorize that the reaction is a bottom-up mechanism and is a way of regulating positive emotions, keeping people from being so overwhelmed by an infant’s cuteness that they begin to neglect caring for it.
Instead, when confronted with cuteness, some people start to feel an urge to squeeze, crush, or bite the cute thing, though without the intent to cause harm.
It’s one of the behaviours that Shaw touches on in her new book, “Evil: The Science behind Humanity’s Dark Side,” as she explores the dark side of the human mind.
From true crime documentaries to horror movies to reading about serial killers, people have always had a fascination with the darker side of humanity.
Rather than being a moral deficiency, or something to be ashamed of, Shaw says that exploring the dark side of our nature is a natural process that human beings go through.
Shaw says that people have a tendency to separate “us” and “them,” comparing themselves to others to strengthen their self-image that they are a good person.
“Looking at serial killers, it’s like the ultimate example of a bad person,” Shaw said.
But Shaw warns that people need to be careful, as that comparison act can not only be dehumanizing, but also leave people feeling too assured in their “goodness.”
“We need to be careful that we’re not creating artificial boundaries,” Shaw said, “because I think we’re all capable of much more than we let on.”
From small acts of passive aggression to full blown murder fantasies (which she says are far more common than people are willing to admit), Shaw says that all humans have dark thoughts lingering in their brain.
It’s something that makes trying to define the nebulous concept of “evil” significantly more difficult.
Shaw argues that there is no such thing as objective evil, but rather that humans make evil when we label something as such.
“I think that we all have our different notions as to what evil means and who or what behavior we would label evil,” Shaw said.
What some people consider normal, others might find abhorrent. Acts like sex before marriage or eating meat may be perfectly acceptable to some, but can represent a severe moral failing to others.
Even acts like killing can be difficult to pin down, with groups like the Irish Republican Army being terrorists to some and freedom fighters to others.
That fact makes it important that people try to exercise “evil empathy” Shaw says.
Rather than simply condemning things as “evil” and shutting down the conversation, people are better off trying to think critically about why people do things.
In turbulent times, with everything from online trolls to neo-nazis weighing heavily on the minds of society, Shaw says that it’s important to try to understand why people take the actions they do.
It’s far more constructive than writing someone off as “evil,” Shaw says, because then they stop seeing the person as a person.
“Trying to break it down, trying to figure out how we can understand people is always a good thing,” she said.
