I bet you want to cuddle me: 'Gan Ju', the infant Fancois Langu monkey with his mother "Saigon' at Taronga Zoo. Picture: Brad Hunter
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CUTE and cuddly touches us so deeply we're hard-wired to lose control - even to the point of aggression.

And it appears were powerless to resist.

The Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Texas at the weekend was told that the cuter the animal or child, the more we feel compelled to over-react.

We know fuzzy cats and adorable puppies are what the likes of Facebook are built upon. And we all feel the urge to coo and pinch a baby's cheek - especially if it is a relative.

According to the research, it's a deep compulsion.

We're tuned to have a strong positive response: So strong, in fact, that it over-rides our inhibitions.

A deep urge surges up to do something about that cute - be it cuddle it, squeeze it, pinch it or - "like" it.

Rebecca Dyer, a graduate student in psychology at Yale University, said: "You know, you can't stand it, you can't handle it, that kind of thing.

"We think it's about high positive-affect, an approach orientation and almost a sense of lost control."

Ms Dyer told LiveScience she decided to research the subject after discussing with colleagues how adorable internet pictures often produced an over-reaction, such as the urge to squeeze a critter.

Such "cute aggression", she said, seemed odd: Cute should inspire a sense of care and delicacy.

So she turned to the internet.

A group of 109 volunteers was recruited to look at pictures of animals divided into categories: Cute, funny or neutral.

The subjects rated how much each picture made them feel a loss of self control, such as "I can't handle it", and how much they want to squeeze something.

The finding supported her hypothesis.

A second study backed this finding up.

A group of men and women was found to pop more bubbles when watching a cute slideshow (120 on average) when compared to looking at funny images (80 pops).

It's this frustrated need to act that probably generates so many "likes" on Facebook and so many "forwards" on those cute chain emails.

Why? That comes next.

Ms Dyer will study if the motivation is frustration at not being able to cuddle, or simply that a strong emotional response overwhelms our self control.

"It might also be that how we deal with high positive-emotion is to sort of give it a negative pitch somehow," she said.