Filipinos call it gigil: the urge to clench your hands or squeeze something because it is almost unbearably cute — Yale psychologists only began experimentally studying the same strange response in 2012, eventually describing it as “cute aggression"

My grandmother greeted me the same way every time. She would look at me, make a noise somewhere between a growl and a hiss, then clamp both hands onto my cheeks like she was testing a melon for ripeness.

I was about six. I assumed this was standard adult behaviour.

It was closer to a controlled detonation than a hug. She loved me so much that her hands needed a job, and my face was the nearest available surface.

In Manila we had a word for what she was doing. Gigil.

The word English never got round to inventing

Gigil is Tagalog. It describes the moment something is so adorable that your body files a formal complaint. Hands clench. Teeth grit. You get a sudden, specific urge to squeeze whatever is causing the problem.

For most of my life it was a word I could only use with other Filipinos. Everyone else got a clumsy three-sentence translation and a slightly worried look. Then in March 2025 the Oxford English Dictionary added gigil to the dictionary, one of more than forty borrowed words filling gaps English had never plugged.

I felt oddly territorial about it for a week.

Yale needed 109 volunteers and a lot of bubble wrap

Filipino grandmothers have had this sorted for generations. Psychology only caught up around 2012.

Two Yale graduate students, Rebecca Dyer and Oriana Aragón, showed people slideshows of cute animals, funny animals and ordinary-looking animals. Each was handed a sheet of bubble wrap and told the study was about motor activity. Pop as many or as few as you like.

The cute slideshow group popped around 120 bubbles on average. The neutral group managed just over 100. The funny group, 80.

They named it cute aggression. When reporters asked Aragón whether English had a term for it, she said no and pointed at gigil, which pleases me more than it probably should.

Nobody in these experiments wanted to hurt anything, and the researchers were careful to say so.

What your brain is actually up to

The explanation has an ugly name attached to a simple idea. The Yale team called these dimorphous expressions: one feeling, two opposite outputs.

In plain English, when a good feeling gets too big, some of it escapes through the emergency exit marked negative. You cry at weddings. You laugh when someone tells you something awful. You want to bite a puppy.

Their theory is that the aggressive urge works as a pressure valve, taking the edge off so you can get on with your day instead of standing on a pavement staring at a corgi for forty minutes.

In 2018 Katherine Stavropoulos at UC Riverside put electrodes on 54 people and showed them photos of babies and baby animals. Those reporting the strongest cute aggression also showed the strongest activity in the brain’s reward system. She has described it as the first direct evidence of a neural basis for the phenomenon.

That is one study with 54 participants, so hold it loosely. But it points the same direction as the behavioural work: a feature of the wiring rather than a fault in it.

Good news arrives sideways too

Here is where this stops being about puppies.

The day I signed the papers selling my restaurants, deep into the pandemic, I walked out to the car park and laughed. A real, undignified laugh, alone, next to a skip.

I spent months afterwards quietly wondering what was wrong with me. Years of work gone, and my body’s contribution was comedy.

Nothing was wrong with me. Large feelings do not queue politely and arrive in the correct uniform. They come out sideways. Happy tears. Nervous laughter. The strange flatness after news you were certain would feel enormous.

Most of the self-doubt I see people carry about their own feelings traces back to one bad assumption: that the output should match the input. Often it does not.

Why having the word helps

I am wary of the idea that naming something fixes it. Self-development writing is full of people who confuse the two.

But naming does one useful thing. It removes the private worry that you are the only one.

Before I had the word, my grandmother’s greeting was a personal eccentricity I would have struggled to defend to anyone. With the word, it is a recognised human response with a research literature and a dictionary entry. Same behaviour, entirely different weight.

This works for the unglamorous feelings too. If you have ever felt a spike of resentment towards someone you love, or gone cold on a project the week it finally succeeded, the better question is what that feeling is regulating.

Three things I do with it now

First, I stopped auditing my reactions for correctness. When the response is odd but harmless, I let it run. My beagle Hugo gets talked to in a voice I would deny in court.

Second, I read other people’s sideways reactions more generously. The friend who cracks a joke at the funeral is not being callous. The colleague who goes quiet when praised is not being ungrateful. The signal is intensity, and intensity does not sort itself neatly on the way out.

Third, I pay attention when the valve runs overtime. An occasional urge to squeeze a puppy is ordinary. Feeling regularly overwhelmed to the point where your own reactions worry you is worth raising with a doctor or someone you trust.

My grandmother died before gigil made it into the dictionary. She would not have cared much. She had the word already, and she used it on my face for a decade.