Abstract
The experience of aesthetic chills, often defined as a subjective response accompanied by goosebumps, shivers and tingling sensations, is a phenomenon often utilized to indicate moments of peak pleasure and emotional arousal in psychological research. However, little is currently understood about how to conceptualize the experience, particularly in terms of whether chills are general markers of intense pleasure and emotion, or instead a collection of distinct phenomenological experiences. To address this, a web-study was designed using images, videos, music videos, texts and music excerpts (from both an online forum dedicated to chills-eliciting stimuli and previous musical chills study), to explore variations across chills experience in terms of bodily and emotional responses reported. Results suggest that across participants (N = 179), three distinct chills categories could be identified: warm chills (chills co-occurring with smiling, warmth, feeling relaxed, stimulated and happy), cold chills (chills co-occurring with frowning, cold, sadness and anger), and moving chills (chills co-occurring with tears, feeling a lump in the throat, emotional intensity, and feelings of affection, tenderness and being moved). Warm chills were linked to stimuli expressing social communion and love; cold chills were elicited by stimuli portraying entities in distress, and support from one to another; moving chills were elicited by most stimuli, but their incidence were also predicted by ratings of trait empathy. Findings are discussed in terms of being moved, the importance of differing induction mechanisms such as shared experience and empathic concern, and the implications of distinct chills categories for both individual differences and inconsistencies in the existing aesthetic chills literature.
Highlights
The experience of aesthetic chills is often characterized as a subjective response accompanied by either goosebumps, shivers or more elusive tingling sensations
These stimuli were derived from both a previous musical chills experiment [20], and an online internet forum dedicated to content that elicits what users label frisson, on the social media website Reddit. On this forum, users submit a variety of multimedia content that gives them the experience of frisson, and other users can discuss and comment on the content, with each user being able to cast a vote for each item (+1 for good, enjoyable or effective elicitor, and -1 for the opposite); this provides a user-generated hierarchy of effect across the thousands of items uploaded to the forum, with presumably the most effective elicitors of frisson voted to the top of the rankings
With regards to the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) trait empathy scores, mean total score out of a maximum of 140 was 89.35 (SD = 9.86); no significant differences between males (M = 87.20, SD = 11.72) and females (M = 90.04, SD = 8.88) were found for trait empathy (t = -1.51, df = 73.56, p = .13); no differences were found across the four trait empathy sub-scales
Summary
The experience of aesthetic chills is often characterized as a subjective response accompanied by either goosebumps, shivers or more elusive tingling sensations. The response has been a useful indicator of strong emotional experiences in experimental settings, given a correspondence between physiological activity (e.g. skin conductance [1], pupil dilation [2], and goosebumps [3, 4]), and subjective feeling components of emotion [5, 6]. Chills have further been linked to pleasure and reward systems in the brain when listening to music [7,8,9].
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