Distinct varieties of aesthetic chills in response to multimedia

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.

“Stopping for knowledge”: The sense of beauty in the perception-action cycle

“…This cognitive state should result in the inhibition of the motor component of the response to beautiful stimuli. This hypothesis is supported by behavioural research investigating the elicitation of chills by beautiful stimuli, showing that participants experience a strong relaxation during the chill episode (Bannister, 2019;Schoeller & Perlovsky, 2016). Moreover, recent neuroimaging results support the presence of motor inhibition during aesthetic experiences (relevant research related to the present hypothesis is reported in Table 1, second section; brain areas involved in this mechanism are presented in Figure 1B).…”

“…Preliminary results in empirical aesthetics research already support this intuition. Indeed, aesthetic chills have been considered as a universal marker of openness to experience (McCrae, 2007;Silvia and Nusbaum, 2011), enhance altruism (Fukui and Toyoshima, 2014) and might be triggered by mechanisms such as shared experience and empathic resonance (Bannister, 2019;Schoeller et al, 2018), which reduce the uncertainty regarding other people's contents of mind (Schoeller et al, 2018). In simple terms, within a relational context, the experience of beauty might favour a deeper understanding of others' mind (Pelowski et al, 2018;Schoeller et al, 2018) through the emotional resonance (Fuchs and Koch, 2014;Gallese, 2007) between minds.…”

Tears of joy, aesthetic chills and heartwarming feelings: Physiological correlates of Kama Muta

“…We assume that piloerection in response to kama muta reflects a social signal and represents a motivation to approach others (Maruskin et al., 2012; Zickfeld, Schubert, Seibt, Blomster, et al, 2019). Maruskin and colleagues provided some first evidence for this notion, showing that a specific form of chills, so‐called goosetingles , is related to approach motivations (see also Bannister, 2019).…”

The relationship between valence and chills in music: A corpus analysis

“…As is the case with sophisticated music, intense music is linked with openness to experience (Schäfer & Mehlhorn, 2017), a known personality correlate of chills. Interestingly, these results provide some support for the possibility that different types of chills are elicited by different types of feelings and affective states expressed or evoked by music (Bannister, 2019;Maruskin et al, 2012).…”

“…Conflicting effects of valence on chills have been discussed in the context of being moved, a mixed emotional state involving sadness and joy (Menninghaus et al, 2015). More specifically, being moved has been associated with chills when listening to music (Bannister, 2019(Bannister, , 2020Bannister & Eerola, 2018;Benedek & Kaernbach, 2011), and has been found to mediate the relationship between liking and sadness in response to music (Vuoskoski & Eerola, 2017). Moving stimuli often feature narrative displays of social separation or reunion (Wassiliwizky et al, 2015), prosocial behaviour (Wassiliwizky et al, 2017), or self-sacrifice (Konečni et al, 2007), but it remains unclear how such narrative features translate to music, and how stimulus valence relates to the occurrence of chills.…”