海角大神

Why can't we seem to get enough of聽聽and now Earl the聽? It聽comes down to eye contact, nurturing, and a need for variety, say experts.

Grumpy Cat, with his flat face and bulbous eyes, has become a one-cat cottage industry, appearing on everything from mugs to the movie聽 鈥溾�� (2014).

But now, Instagram user Derek Bloomfield鈥檚 moody-looking pooch, Earl, is online to rival the pouting puss on social media.

The images quickly made the leap across platforms to Twitter.

In an interview, Roger聽Dooley, author of聽聽and聽the popular blog聽,聽says the social media appeal of these surly creatures stems from 鈥� a shift in attractiveness that signals a novelty factor is involved, that people are tired of a stock photo of a cute cat or cute dog.鈥�

鈥淓ven animal lovers get tired of looking at the same old thing,鈥� Mr. Dooley says. 鈥淧eople can only stand so much cuteness.鈥�

Also, he says, 鈥淚f you can assign this sort of unexpected emotion to an animal, it鈥檚 effective. I think we don鈥檛 expect our animals to be grumpy, so as a result you have that novelty factor at work too.鈥�

Dooley engages in consumer neuroscience, which seeks to use scientific discoveries about the brain to determine the motivations behind consumer choices.

It鈥檚 not hard to find evidence of the level of engagement humans have with images of cats and dogs. A simple Google search on cat images yields 590,000,000 results, of which 6,790,000 results are of just Grumpy Cat. The same search for dog images yields 556,000,000 results, 4,700,000 of which are of grumpy dogs.

Dooley says that cute animals have always been an effective marketing tool, a practice he attributes to both the 鈥渁nthropomorphizing of animals and the fact that humans are attracted to larger eyes, which animals have.鈥�

, Associate Professor Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College in聽Hanover, New Hampshire who works on聽, says in an interview that in these cases of Grumpy Cat and Earl, 鈥淭he eyes are driving a lot of the signal.鈥�

鈥淲hen we look at a cat face we鈥檙e applying the same things we do when looking at a human face,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he eyes are narrowed and the mouth is curved downward. We read that as the cat having a kind of complex emotion like we have. We鈥檙e attracted to it the way we would be to a grumpy faced human or a kid making that face we鈥檇 think it was funny.鈥�

Looking at the photos of Earl, Duchaine exclaims, 鈥淥h, yeah, that puppy is grumpy. And it looks like an old man too.鈥�

鈥淚 think it鈥檚 the eyes and the mouth driving it,鈥� he says. 鈥淵ou can cover up everything else and with just the eyes and the mouth you get the signal of anger, grumpiness, pretty clearly.鈥�

Another factor that may be driving the almost physical pull of these animal images is the that humans are attracted to larger eyes thanks to a built in trigger that sensitizes us to our young.

鈥淚t鈥檚 a signal for youth and babies have large eyes relative to their heads,鈥� Duchaine explains. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 something you see in all juvenile animals and it鈥檚 something we find appealing, maybe because we鈥檝e been designed to respond to juveniles 鈥� caretaking.鈥�

A good side-by-side comparison might be the popularity of grumpy-faced toddlers to grumpy animals. A Google search for baby images yields 912,000,000 results, while looking for grumpy baby pictures furnishes 4,010,000 results (just a shy of today鈥檚 4,700,000 Grumpy Dog results).

While the grumpy animal trend is unlikely to last very long, human nature, marketing and neuroscience combine to keep these favorites in the back of our minds.

鈥淭his is just an interesting meme that will eventually get overworked and die back to a lower level,鈥� Dooley concludes. 鈥淚 think at the moment, whenever you鈥檝e got one of these memes that sort of explode they have a period of strong growth and eventually the shelf-life becomes a little bit more limited. Not that they ever go away.鈥�

Paul Nelson, creator of聽聽on Tumblr has resisted the siren song of the grumpy, "I never have posted Grumpy Cat or anything related to him, though I admit some of the memes are good for a chuckle. But I prefer cat posts that are good-natured fun and, I guess at the heart of it, more positive in that they celebrate the hilarity of cats and cat ownership."