Imagine listening to a powerful piece of music, witnessing an awe-inspiring piece of art, or being moved by a profound speech. Suddenly, you feel a shiver, goosebumps, or a chilling sensation down your spine—a phenomenon known as “aesthetic chills.”
A new study published in PNAS Nexus has shed light on this response, revealing that a mix of age, gender, emotional state, personality traits, and cultural exposure can predict with 73.5% accuracy when someone will experience these chills. The discovery opens new doors to understanding our emotional reactions and potentially harnessing these peak experiences for therapeutic purposes.
Aesthetic chills represent one of the purest forms of emotional peak experiences, where the body physically reacts to emotional or aesthetic stimuli. While we know that these experiences can vary greatly from person to person, understanding why and how this happens has remained a challenge.
“We needed a system to elicit chills in the laboratory and study their neural basis,” explained study author Felix Schoeller, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies in Santa Monica.
“The technique used by researchers until now was to ask subjects to bring their own stimuli, which introduces all sorts of biases and methodology issues. The most immediate purpose was to save time, money, and energy for researchers working on the topic. Now, we are applying the models to design personalized interventions, primarily in the context of major depressive disorder. Aesthetic chills seem to have all sorts of interesting downstream effects on reward learning and cognition for these patient populations.”
Conducted in Southern California, the study included a large and diverse sample of 2,937 participants. To measure participants’ baseline emotional states, they were asked to indicate their levels of emotional valence and arousal. Emotional valence refers to the extent to which an emotion is experienced as positive or negative, while arousal refers to its intensity.
Following this, the participants completed a battery of questionnaires designed to capture a wide array of psychological traits and predispositions. These included the Disposition Positive Affect Scale (DPES), the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI), and the Kama Muta questionnaire (KAMF), among others, each providing insights into different facets of the participants’ emotional and personality profiles.
Participants were then exposed to one of 40 stimuli, selected through a rigorous process that involved crowdsourcing and validation to ensure their potential to elicit aesthetic chills. These stimuli were a mix of audio and audiovisual formats, including music and speeches known to induce chills. The stimuli used in the study are available on chillsdb.com.
After exposure to their assigned stimulus, participants reported their emotional state again, along with their level of liking for the video, whether they had previously seen the video, and if they experienced chills, including the frequency and intensity of these chills.
Among the diverse stimuli tested, certain ones stood out for their strong association with the elicitation of aesthetic chills. Notably, the “Hallelujah Choir” emerged as the most potent trigger, significantly outperforming others in inducing chills.
However, when comparing different types of stimuli—audio-only versus audiovisual—the researchers found no significant difference in their ability to provoke chills, suggesting that the essence of the stimulus, rather than its format, plays a critical role in triggering this response.
The researchers found that an individual’s psychological state at the time of exposure significantly influenced the likelihood of experiencing chills. Higher arousal and positive valence were associated with an increased chance of experiencing chills, pointing to the emotional readiness of an individual as a key determinant.
Schoeller and his colleagues identified distinct groups within the population that exhibited a notably high prevalence of experiencing chills. For instance, a demographic class predominantly aged between 35 and 44 years, with a significant educational attainment, showed an 88.2% rate of experiencing chills. This group also scored high in extraversion and conscientiousness, suggesting a profile of individuals particularly predisposed to aesthetic chills.
“The results of the latent class analysis are interesting, they reveal that some portions of the population are more likely to experience chills in general,” Schoeller told PsyPost. “In the article, we suggest that these may be thought of as “cultural resonators”, people who are more likely to resonate with the cultural milieu where they find themselves embedded.”
The application of machine learning techniques yielded predictive models with significant accuracy. By combining demographic, psychological, and state-related variables, the researchers developed models that could predict the occurrence of chills with up to 73.5% accuracy. These models identified key predictors such as age, gender, arousal levels, and specific psychological measures, highlighting the multifaceted nature of chills elicitation.
“We were able to build mathematical models of what stimuli are most likely to give you chills depending on who you are (personality), where you come from (demographics), and how you are feeling (emotional state),” Schoeller explained. “If you are from Southern California, we can now have you take a short questionnaire and predict what music, speech, or film will give you chills. If you have never experienced them, then you should come by the lab.”
Despite its comprehensive approach, the study — like all research — has limitations, including its regional focus on Southern California and its cross-sectional design. Future research could benefit from more geographically diverse and longitudinal studies to confirm and expand these findings. Additionally, exploring genetic and neuroimaging methodologies could offer deeper insights into the biological underpinnings of aesthetic chills.
“We have been working on replicating these results in a different population (Texans), and the results seem to hold,” Schoeller noted.
The ultimate aim is to utilize aesthetic chills as a nonpharmacological tool to enhance positive emotional experiences and support mental health recovery.
“Our long-term goal is to deliver the right stimulus at the right time to the right person, to help patients get a new perspective on life and escape the vicious cycle of depression,” Schoeller told PsyPost. “We are now using language models and speech synthesis to create clones of the chill-eliciting stimuli, targeting specific ‘depressogenic’ beliefs not present in the original stimulus (shame, negativity, mistrust).”
The study, “Predicting individual differences in peak emotional response,” was authored by Felix Schoeller, Leonardo Christov-Moore, Caitlin Lynch, Thomas Diot, and Nicco Reggente