I found a study on "KAWAII."

To create an attractive and memorable website for children, we constantly studied how to make our artwork attractive and easy to accept. For almost 20 years, I have been thinking, "What kind of visual aids can we create that children will enjoy watching and will remember the environmental messages we share with them for a long time?

The correct response is either "Cute" or "Kawaii. "What exactly is meant by the term "kawaii," and why have children and young adults all around the world become so obsessed with "kawaii" characters? The majority of the images we created were "kawaii" characters. However, we wanted to verify that it was appropriate from a scholarly standpoint.

When a person experiences the feelings of being Cute, Friendly, Harmless, and Pretty simultaneously, they get a sensation that can only be defined as "KAWAII."

We found one excellent research conducted by Professor Hiroshi Nittono, who teaches at the Graduate School of Human Sciences at Osaka University in Japan. Professor Nittono is a researcher of Cognitive Psychophysiology.

In this study that he published in the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture in 2016 [1], we can find a thorough theoretical explanation and psychological confirmation of the issue that we have all longed to know the answer to: "Why do people find it Kawaii?" The results of statistical analysis produced this figure. When the feelings of being Cute, Friendly, Harmless, and Pretty are combined, as Professor Nittono explains, we experience a feeling that can only be described as "KAWAII."

[1] Source: Figure 6 in Nittono, H. (2016). The two-layer model of “kawaii”: A behavioral science framework for understanding kawaii and cuteness. East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, 2(1), 79-95. Doi:10 1386/eapc.2.1.79_1