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A new study published in Political Psychology suggests that people at both ends of the political spectrum may experience more intense physical reactions to emotionally stirring stimuli, such as inspirational speeches or powerful music. These responses, often described as “aesthetic chills,” were more pronounced among both very liberal and very conservative participants, and this heightened reaction appears to be linked to traits like religiosity and bodily awareness.
While past work suggested that conservatives might be especially responsive to emotionally resonant moments, the current findings point to a broader pattern. The intensity of people’s physical reactions seemed to grow the further their political beliefs strayed from the center, hinting at a possible connection between emotional depth and ideological extremity, regardless of direction.
Aesthetic chills, often described as shivers or goosebumps triggered by music, speeches, or other powerful stimuli, have been viewed as markers of emotional intensity and self-transcendent experiences. These sensations are frequently reported during moments of awe, inspiration, or deep emotional resonance.
Previous research found that conservatives tended to report more intense chills, even though liberals and conservatives experienced them at similar rates. One interpretation is that conservatives may be more emotionally reactive in specific contexts, possibly due to deeper religious engagement or greater sensitivity to purity and disgust—traits often associated with conservative worldviews.
However, the researchers behind the current study sought to dig deeper. They wanted to know whether the link between political conservatism and chills was truly about ideology or whether other factors—like being a cultural minority or possessing greater emotional awareness—might play a more central role. To do so, they compared two politically and culturally distinct U.S. regions: California and Texas.
“I have long been interested in the role that ‘the gut’ plays in our decision-making, ranging from Elaine Scarry’s work in ‘the body in pain’ where she discusses the dehumanizing effects of propaganda, to Jonathan Haidt’s ‘Emotional Dog, Rational Tail,'” said study author Leonardo Christov-Moore, a senior scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies and research director for Sensoria Research.
“This led me to study the somatomotor/affective roots of prosocial behavior with Marco Iacoboni at UCLA, and later the role of feeling/interoceptive states in other-regard with Jonas Kaplan and Antonio Damasio. This specific study arose from recent work with Felix Schoeller and Nicco Reggente in over 6,000 participants, where we noted that more conservative participants seemed to show more intense aesthetic visceral responses to moving music.”
In their new study, the researchers surveyed 882 adults from Southern California and Central Texas, ensuring that participants reflected a mix of political orientations, genders, ethnic backgrounds, and educational levels. Using an online platform, participants were assigned to watch one of four videos previously validated to elicit chills. These included either a musical performance of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” or Charlie Chaplin’s iconic speech from The Great Dictator, each available in audio-only or audiovisual format.
Before watching the videos, participants completed a battery of psychological questionnaires. These included measures of personality traits, religiosity, emotional states, absorption (or how easily someone becomes emotionally immersed), and interoceptive awareness—how attuned someone is to their internal bodily sensations.
After viewing the videos, participants were asked whether they experienced chills, how intense the experience was, and whether they had goosebumps. They also answered follow-up questions about their emotional reactions, including feelings of connection, ego dissolution, and moral elevation.
Roughly 58% of participants reported experiencing chills during the video. As expected, political conservatism was again linked to higher intensity of chills. This pattern held even when the researchers controlled for factors like location (California versus Texas) and personality traits. But the most revealing insights came when the researchers took a closer look at the role of religious belief and bodily awareness.
Religiosity emerged as a strong predictor of chills intensity. People who reported stronger religious beliefs were more likely to report powerful bodily reactions to the stimuli. This suggests that religious individuals—who may be more practiced in spiritual awe and transcendence—are also more emotionally moved by similar types of experiences, regardless of their political stance.
“Across two matched populations (California and Texas), conservatives do seem to show more intense aesthetic responses to moving music,” Christov-Moore told PsyPost. “However, this may be explained partly by greater religiosity among conservatives.”
Another important factor was interoceptive awareness. People who reported being more in tune with their bodily states—like noticing their heart racing or feeling emotional tension in their chest—also tended to experience more intense chills. This body-awareness variable turned out to be especially important in explaining a surprising pattern in the data: a U-shaped relationship between political orientation and chills intensity.
Although the original hypothesis focused on conservatism, the data showed that participants at both ideological extremes—very liberal and very conservative—reported stronger bodily reactions than those in the political center. This U-shaped trend was mirrored in levels of interoceptive awareness, suggesting that political extremism may be associated with a greater sensitivity to emotionally powerful, bodily-felt experiences.
When the researchers recoded political orientation to reflect extremity rather than direction, they found that interoceptive awareness played a larger role in mediating the relationship between political extremism and chills than religiosity did. In other words, it was not just belief systems that mattered, but how attuned people were to the physical sensations that accompany strong emotions.
“When we looked at the data in terms of distance from the political center, it was actually a better fit, and suggested that extreme aesthetic responses are more associated with extreme political views,” Christov-Moore explained. “In support of this, the same relationship was shown with peoples’ interoceptive awareness, the salience or presence of their internal sensations in day-to-day awareness. This suggests that bridging the gap between political extremes may require bridging emotional/visceral worlds, and that moderates may have an even more difficult task in communicating with the extremes on either end, because it requires translating between different types of thinking.”
“It was surprising that an initial suspicion around extremes vs conservatism/progressivism per se was a much better fit to the data. It was an exercise in stepping back and reexamining our own frame of reference for the study. It was also surprisingly reassuring to see what I think many of us hope in this day and age, that we need to examine the political spectrum along more than a single axis.”
“There is a cross-partisan camaraderie, I think, in seeing evidence that people of every kind feel deeply around group choral music (the major common thread in our chills-evoking stimuli set). It is important to be reminded of the depth and complexity of others’ internal lives, rather than the ‘NPC’ framing that is often applied in our solipsistic media culture.”
The study provides evidence that political extremism, whether left- or right-leaning, may be associated with stronger emotional reactions to powerful stimuli, as reflected in the experience of aesthetic chills. But as with all research, there are limitations. The results are based on self-report data. It’s possible that people at different ends of the political spectrum are simply more inclined to describe their experiences in intense terms.
“However, we have since performed on-site studies including neural and physiological data supporting our framework and the universality of the chills experience as a marker of insight and peak experience,” Christov-Moore noted.
The study also focused on positive aesthetic chills, like those caused by music or moral inspiration. Future research could explore chills associated with fear or threat, especially since fear is another emotion tightly linked to political ideology. Validating fear-based chills stimuli could help researchers understand how different emotions interact with belief systems across the political spectrum.
Another open question is whether the effects seen here would replicate in other cultural contexts, such as in countries where the links between religiosity and conservatism are weaker. Exploring these dynamics in secular societies might help disentangle how cultural norms shape the emotional foundations of political belief.
“Our work increasingly shows that (a) aesthetic chills are an objective marker of subjective insight and transformative experience; that (b) they can be leveraged to safely, controllably cause the therapeutic effects associated with more elusive or unwieldy states associated with meditation and psychedelics; and (c) that they can be combined to augment other forms of targeted transformative interventions (such as prayer, loving kindness meditation, or maladaptive schema-based cognitive-behavioral therapy),” Christov-Moore said.
“Our long-term goals are to harness these controllable transformative states to help people overcome trauma and depression, emerge from rigid, maladaptive belief systems, and achieve self-transcendent states in a more democratized fashion, without the need for a single belief system.”
“The Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies is an independent, 501c(3) nonprofit research institute, that is trying to provide a third path between traditional academia and the private sector. As part of this, we are seeking to increasingly decentralize and crowdfund scientific research. If you’d like to learn more about this, please check out our latest crowdfunded studies (https://advancedconsciousness.org/donate/), our ongoing projects (https://advancedconsciousness.org/research) and explore any of existing work on chills, all of which can be found in its peer-reviewed and more digestible blog form here : https://advancedconsciousness.org/proceedings/.”
The study, “Individual differences in aesthetic experience point to the role of bodily awareness in political orientation,” was authored by Leonardo Christov-Moore, Felix Schoeller, Anthony G. Vaccaro, Brock Pluimer, Marco Iacoboni, Jonas Kaplan, and Nicco Reggente.
