Aesthetic chills cause an emotional drift in valence and arousal

Abstract

Aesthetic chills are an embodied peak emotional experience induced by stimuli such as music, films, and speeches and characterized by dopaminergic release. The emotional consequences of chills in terms of valence and arousal are still debated and the existing empirical data is conflicting. In this study, we tested the effects of ChillsDB, an open-source repository of chills-inducing stimuli, on the emotional ratings of 600+ participants. We found that participants experiencing chills reported significantly more positive valence and greater arousal during the experience, compared to participants who did not experience chills. This suggests that the embodied experience of chills may influence one’s perception and affective evaluation of the context, in favor of theoretical models emphasizing the role of interoceptive signals such as chills in the process of perception and decision-making. We also found an interesting pattern in the valence ratings of participants, which tended to harmonize toward a similar mean after the experiment, though initially disparately distributed. We discuss the significance of these results for the diagnosis and treatment of dopaminergic disorders such as Parkinson’s, schizophrenia, and depression.

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TYPE Original Research
PUBLISHED 07 March 2023
DOI 10.3389/fnins.2022.1013117
OPEN ACCESS
EDITED BY
Mariella Pazzaglia,
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
REVIEWED BY
Alexander Toet,
Netherlands Organisation for Applied
Scientific Research, Netherlands
Erik Leemhuis,
Santa Lucia Foundation (IRCCS), Italy
*CORRESPONDENCE
Abhinandan Jain
abyjain@mit.edu
Felix Schoeller
felixsch@mit.edu
†PRESENT ADDRESS
Xiaoxiao Hu,
Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA,
United States
‡These authors share first authorship
SPECIALTY SECTION
This article was submitted to
Perception Science,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Neuroscience
RECEIVED 06 August 2022
ACCEPTED 09 December 2022
PUBLISHED 07 March 2023
CITATION
Jain A, Schoeller F, Horowitz A, Hu X,
Yan G, Salomon R and Maes P (2023)
Aesthetic chills cause an emotional
drift in valence and arousal.
Front. Neurosci. 16:1013117.
doi: 10.3389/fnins.2022.1013117
COPYRIGHT
© 2023 Jain, Schoeller, Horowitz, Hu,
Yan, Salomon and Maes. This is an
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does not comply with these terms.
Aesthetic chills cause an
emotional drift in valence and
arousal
Abhinandan Jain1*‡, Felix Schoeller1,2,3*‡, Adam Horowitz1,
Xiaoxiao Hu1†, Grace Yan1, Roy Salomon2and Pattie Maes1
1MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, United States, 2The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Centre,
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel, 3Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, Santa Monica,
CA, United States
Aesthetic chills are an embodied peak emotional experience induced by
stimuli such as music, films, and speeches and characterized by dopaminergic
release. The emotional consequences of chills in terms of valence and
arousal are still debated and the existing empirical data is conflicting. In this
study, we tested the effects of ChillsDB, an open-source repository of chills-
inducing stimuli, on the emotional ratings of 600+ participants. We found that
participants experiencing chills reported significantly more positive valence
and greater arousal during the experience, compared to participants who
did not experience chills. This suggests that the embodied experience of
chills may influence one’s perception and affective evaluation of the context,
in favor of theoretical models emphasizing the role of interoceptive signals
such as chills in the process of perception and decision-making. We also
found an interesting pattern in the valence ratings of participants, which
tended to harmonize toward a similar mean after the experiment, though
initially disparately distributed. We discuss the significance of these results for
the diagnosis and treatment of dopaminergic disorders such as Parkinson’s,
schizophrenia, and depression.
KEYWORDS
chills, emotion, valence, arousal, emotional drift, ChillsDB, interindividual
differences, synchronization
1. Introduction
Aesthetic chills (thereafter “chills”) are a peak emotional response characterized by
a feeling of cold down the spine, sometimes accompanied by goosebumps (e.g., on the
arms). While chills are a growing topic of study, evidence is still conflicting in regards to
the emotional consequences of chills and interindividual differences (see e.g., Panksepp,
1995;Grewe et al.,2011;Zickfeld et al.,2020;de Fleurian and Pearce,2021). Specifically,
the causes and consequences of chills in terms of valence (i.e., hedonic tone or affective
quality) and arousal (i.e., the level of autonomic activation) are still unclear (de Fleurian
and Pearce,2021). Chills have been linked to a wide range of emotions, both positive and
negative, as well as general arousal response (Maruskin et al.,2012). Brain studies suggest
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chills engage reward-related brain regions, in the striatum
and prefrontal cortex (Blood and Zatorre,2001) specifically
rewarding dopamine release in the caudate nucleus and nucleus
accumbens (Salimpoor et al.,2011). While chills tend to produce
physiological arousal and reward, the underlying mechanism,
consequences and downstream effects are still unclear. In order
to address these questions, we tested the emotional reaction of
600+ participants to ChillsDB, an open-source database of chills
stimuli, searching for interindividual differences and variations
in the ratings of valence and arousal based on whether or not the
participants experienced chills.
Chills seem to be a universal emotional phenomenon found
across human cultures and languages (McCrae,2007). As a
marker of human peak experiences across the arts, sciences, and
world religions (Schoeller,2015a), chills can be generated by a
wide range of media: music, films, paintings, poetry, science,
mathematics, religion, and rituals (Schoeller,2015b). Among
others, they have psychological consequences on pleasure and
reward (Blood and Zatorre,2001;Schoeller and Perlovsky,
2016), prosocial tendencies and altruism (Fukui and Toyoshima,
2014), meaning-making (Schoeller,2015a), attention, memory,
and cognitive function (Sarasso et al.,2020). Their relationship
to physiologic factors includes heart rate (Sumpf et al.,2015),
pupil dilatation (Laeng et al.,2016), skin conductance (Grewe
et al.,2009), and indeed muscle contractions (McPhetres and
Zickfeld,2022). Research has investigated chills’ relationship
to emotional valence and arousal. For example, the emotional
features of chill-eliciting music have been examined (Panksepp,
1995;Grewe et al.,2011;de Fleurian and Pearce,2021). When
analyzing approximately 1,000 musical stimuli, de Fleurian and
Pearce found that chills music was on average more negative
in valence, in accordance with previous findings that chills are
more frequently associated with perceived sadness (Panksepp,
1995). Salimpoor et al. (2011) and Laeng et al. (2016) found
that physiological markers of arousal predicted chills when
listening to music. The study of the adjacent emotion of “being
moved” by Zickfeld et al. (2020) found that experiences rated as
“very moving” resulted in less arousal compared to emotional
experiences rated as “sad.” The evidence further suggests that
there may be interindividual differences in chills induced by
personality and gender. It seems that females experience musical
chills more often than males (Panksepp,1995;Kunkel et al.,
2008). Here again, existing evidence is conflicting as Goldstein’s
(1980), Rickard’s (2004), and Grewe et al.’s (2009) found no
significant difference in terms of gender. To our knowledge, no
age differences have been reported thus far (Goldstein,1980;
Panksepp,1995;Grewe et al.,2009). In terms of personality,
chills have been found to be a good predictor of the personality
trait Openness to Experience (McCrae,2007), specifically item
188 of NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI), which measures
chills in response to music and the arts (McCrae,2007).
This accumulated evidence calls for large scale studies of the
chills phenomenon, mapping stimuli, participants’ states and
traits, and context. The present study is a first attempt to
better characterize the emotion of chills by examining a large
corpus of chills stimuli (ChillsDB) constituted by parsing social
media (YouTube and Reddit). Based on the prior research,
we expect that (1) chills should have an effect on valence
and arousal, (2) there should be interindividual differences
in chills demographics (genre, ethnicity, and age), and (3)
the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and Item
188, in particular, should predict for chills (McCrae,2007;
Krishnakumar and Schoeller,2019).
2. Materials and methods
2.1. Stimuli
We used the top 50 videos of ChillsDB, an open-source
database of validated audiovisual stimuli eliciting aesthetic
chills (goosebumps, psychogenic shivers) in a US population
(Schoeller et al.,2022b). The database consists of 204 chills-
eliciting videos in three categories: music, film, and speech
(see Table 1). ChillsDB was built using an ecologically-valid
method for harnessing chills stimuli “in the wild” by searching
for mentions of somatic markers in user comments using
algorithms to parse social media platforms (YouTube and
Reddit).
2.2. Procedure
We conducted an online study on Prolific crowdsourcing
platform1to evaluate the emotional effect of chill-inducing
videos. Participants were first screened for neurologic disorders
and randomly assigned to one of ChillsDB top 50 videos.
Before the video, they were given a definition of “the feeling
of emotional chills and shivers” as “the feeling of cold down
your spine that are NOT related to temperature or sickness but
that are caused by some strong emotions.” Participants were
asked to report their age, gender, ethnicity, frequency of daily
chills (1 - never; 5 - always), NEO item 188 score (“Sometimes
when I am reading poetry or looking at a work of art, I feel a
chill or wave of excitement”) (1 - Strongly Disagree; 5- Strongly
Agree). Following a circumplex model of emotion (Russell,
1980), participants were asked to report their current mood
in feeling “Extremely Unpleasant” to “Extremely Pleasant” for
the valence rating, “Extremely Calm” to “Extremely Excited”
for the arousal rating, “Extremely Sleepy” to “Fully Awake” for
sleepiness rating on a 10 point Likert scale before the video.
Participants were then exposed to the audiovisual stimulus from
the database and asked to report whenever they experienced
1www.prolific.co
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TABLE 1 A gold standard for aesthetic chills: the top 10 validated videos from our study, including the top three for each category (film, music,
and speech).
Video title Type Video description Average chills
reported
Jurassic World Movie The final battle between Indominus Rex, Tyrannosaurus Rex, and Velociraptors as it
appeared in the movie “Jurassic World” (2015).
3.90
The Hunger Games Movie Fan made video of “The Hanging Tree” from the score of “The Hunger Games.” The
music was composed by James Newton Howard.
4.18
Naruto Movie An important battle in the widely popular Japanese manga series written and
illustrated by Masashi Kishimoto.
2.90
Miserere Music Allegri’s Miserere is written for two choirs, who alternate phrases and then unite for a
final resolution.
2.60
Dream Speech A medley of motivational speeches by speakers such as Les Brown, Eric Thomas, and
Will Smith.
3.00
Dropout Wisdom Speech A speech by Dr. Rick Rigsby about lessons learned from his father. 3.10
Interstellar Movie Fan made video with Interstellar’s Hans Zimmer theme. Chills occur at the line
“Because my dad promised me.”
3.20
Unbroken Speech Fan made video with motivational speeches by Les Brown, Eric Brown, and Steve
Jobs.
2.50
Disney Heroes Movie Fan made video of Disney heroes singing in their native languages, with medley
images of their stories.
3.90
Giving Movie “Giving” is a 3 min Thai TV commercial by TrueMove mobile company. Concept by
Panu Meepaibul.
3.06
All stimuli have a probability ≥0.8 to elicit chills in a US population (from Schoeller et al.,2022a).
chills by pressing a large button on the right side of the
screen. Only once the stimulus is over are they allowed to
continue to the next part of the study. After the exposure
they were asked to report the intensity of the chills, and rate
their experience in terms of valence and arousal all on a five
point Likert scale. Finally, we conclude by asking the final five
items of the NEO questionnaire (“Do you feel you do not
have good imagination,” “Are you quick to understand things,”
“Do you use difficult words,” “Do you spend time reflecting
things,” and “Are you full of ideas.”) on a five point Likert
scale.
To ensure the quality of data we implemented two
attention checks, one before the stimulus and one after, to
determine if participants were paying attention to questions
(Oppenheimer et al.,2009). The attention checks constituted
selecting the correct response to a described question, e.g.,
“Please select ‘strongly agree’ for this question.” Participants
were compensated based on time spent in the study at an
TABLE 2 Independent samples T-test for age, daily occurrences of
chills and NEO item 188.
Statistic df P
Age Student’s t2.41 558 0.016
Daily chills Student’s t−2.83 558 0.005
NEO Item 188 Student’s t−4.28 a 558 <0.001
aLevene’s test is significant (p<0.05), suggesting a violation of the assumption of
equal variances.
approximately hourly rate of USD 11.72. Each experiment lasted
approximately 10 min and was well-received by the participant.
Some of the participants even wrote to the authors a personal
email to thank them for the experience (e.g., “I just wanted to
take a moment and tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed this study
and found it also to be a unique experiment”).
2.3. Participants
Participants were recruited on the Prolific platform and were
screened for psychiatric conditions or neurologic disorders.
660 subjects participated in the experiment (Mean age = 33.6,
50% males, 49.5% female, and 0.5% = other). We removed
100 participants who reported an aberrant proportion of chills
(N>10) and did not fulfill the two attention checks. All
the participants reside in the United States of America and
practice the English language as their first language. 75.7 White,
7.9 Multiracial, 8.4 Asian, 3.6 African American, 3.9 Hispanic,
and 0.5% Others.
2.4. Ethics
The experiment is in compliance with the Helsinki
Declaration. The study was approved by the Committee on
the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects at MIT. All
participants gave their voluntary informed consent and we
followed the Ethics Code of the American Psychological
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FIGURE 1
Arousal and valence ratings prior to exposure to the stimulus are normalized across participants, independently of whether they reported chills.
Hence, prior valence and arousal do not seem to influence the probability of participants to experience chills.
FIGURE 2
Participants rating of the experience depending on whether they experienced chills or not. We found that participants who experienced chills
report significantly greater valence and arousal than those who did not.
TABLE 3 Independent samples T-test for valence and arousal ratings.
Statistic df P Effect size
Experience rating Valence Student’s t−8.324 558 <0.001 Cohen’s d −0.7420
Experience rating Arousal Student’s t−3.082 558 0.002 Cohen’s d −0.2748
Association. All participants were informed about the purpose
of the research, their right to decline to participate and to
withdraw from the experiment, and the limits of confidentiality.
We also provided them with a contact for any questions
concerning the research and with the opportunity to ask any
questions regarding the phenomenon under study (aesthetic
chills) and receive appropriate answers. All participants reacted
positively to the experiment and were thankful for the
opportunity to learn about the phenomenon.
2.5. Reviewer disclosure
Following the standard reviewer disclosure request
endorsed by the Center for Open Science (Lilienfeld,2017).
We confirm to have reported all measures, conditions, data
exclusions, and how we determined our sample sizes.
3. Results
3.1. Chills participants
We then examined interindividual responses in chills
(Table 2). A total of 369 participants reported chills (66%). These
participants who reported more chills (M= 35.7, SD = 13.5),
compared to those who did not (M= 38.7, SD = 14.7) were
significantly younger [t(558) = 2.41, p<0.01]. Participants who
reported chills experienced chills more frequently in everyday
life (M= 1.3, SD = 0.7) as compared to those who did not
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FIGURE 3
Distribution of experience rating for participants depending on whether they experienced chills or not. Participants who reported chills tend to
cluster toward higher arousal and valence ratings than participants who did not.
report chills during the experiment (M= 1.1, SD = 0.7), this
difference is statistically significant [t(558) = −2.83, p∗= 0.005].
Furthermore, participants who reported chills (M= 2.1,
SD = 1.1) had significantly higher scores on the NEO Item 188
[t(558) = −4.28, p∗<0.001] than participants who did not
report chills (M= 1.6, SD = 1.3). Prior subjective ratings of
valence and arousal did not seem to influence the probability
of participants to experience chills (Figure 1).
ANOVA was performed to test the difference in chills
between ethnicities. ANOVA revealed that there was not a
statistically significant difference in chills between the groups
[F(5) = 1.23, p= 0.29]. We also performed an ANOVA to
search for a difference in chills across gender, the test revealed
that there was not a significant difference between genders
[F(3) = 0.55, p= 0.64]. We did not find any statistical difference
in terms of post cumulative NEO score between participants
who experienced chills and those who did not [t(558) = −0.6,
p>0.55]. We found that prior exposure to the stimulus did not
affect chills prevalence [t(558) = −1.15, p>0.25].
3.2. Effects on valence and arousal
Chills participants reported a change in valence and arousal
toward the experience (Figure 2). Compared to the participants
who did not report chills (M= 2.19, SD = 0.78), participants who
reported chills (M= 2.77, SD = 0.78) showed a significantly more
positive valence after the experience [t(558) = −8.3, p<0.001].
We also found a change in arousal, whereby participants who
reported chills (M= 2.41, SD = 0.94) compared to those who did
not (M= 2.15, SD = 0.96), were more aroused [t(558) = −3.1,
p= 0.002]. Hence, we reject the null hypothesis of independence
between chills report and either valence or arousal (Table 3).
Figure 3 shows the distribution of ratings of arousal and valence
of the participants who reported experiencing chills versus who
did not.
We further found the number of chills experienced by
the participants to be positively correlated with the reported
experience arousal (r= 0.104, p∗= 0.014) and valence (r= 0.274,
p∗∗∗ <0.001) ratings. Similarly reported chills intensity was
also positively correlated with the reported experience arousal
(r= 0.162, p∗∗∗ <0.001) and valence (r= 0.417, p∗∗∗ <0.001)
ratings. This suggests a positive impact of the number of
chills and the intensity of chills on emotional appraisal of the
stimuli. Figure 4 shows the drift observed in mean arousal and
valence ratings of the stimulus when participants experience
chills concurrently with the stimulus versus when they do
not.
When examining differences across ethnicities, we found
that, though initially different, the valence and arousal
ratings tended toward a similar mean after the experience
in chills participants (Figure 5). We note however, that
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FIGURE 4
Ratings of the experience in terms of valence and arousal for each stimulus (ratings were normalized from –0.5 to 0.5). The blue dots indicate
mean rating in valence and arousal for stimuli which induced chills in participants while the orange dots indicate the mean valence and arousal
ratings of stimuli which did not induce chills. We see that the majority of stimuli’s ratings tend to cluster in the top right quadrant, whereas the
bottom left quadrant is mostly populated by ratings of stimuli who did not cause the chills. Essentially, this suggests that the chills response
influences the participant’s perception of the stimulus.
this harmonization observed may be an artifact of the
limited resolution of the scales and should be further
investigated.
4. Discussion and conclusion
We examined the emotional consequences of aesthetic
chills in terms of valence and arousal in a large sample
of participants and across many different stimuli including
music, films, and speech. We found that participants who
experienced chills during the experiment reported significantly
more positive emotional valence and greater arousal for their
experience as compared to the participants who did not
report chills. This indicates that the embodied emotion of
chills causes participants to experience stimuli with greater
emotional intensity. It is interesting to consider these results
in light of prior research on the role of dopamine in salience
signaling and so-called precision encoding (Diederen and
Fletcher,2021;Haarsma et al.,2021). Dopamine release has
been linked to improved emotion recognition (Schuster et al.,
2022), which may partially explain some of the results reported
and call for further investigation of the chills phenomenon
in dopaminergic-related pathologies (e.g., Parkinson’s disease,
schizophrenia, and depression), specifically investigating the
role of bodily signals in shaping the perception of the subject’s
context and rewarding stimuli (Nguyen et al.,2015;Schoeller
et al.,2022a).
Our findings extend previous studies by Salimpoor et al.
(2011) and Laeng et al. (2016) who found that—when listening
to music—physiological markers of arousal predicted chills. It is
interesting to consider that Fleurian and Pearce found that chills
music was on average lower in valence, and Panksepp’s found
that chills were associated with perceived sadness (Panksepp,
1995), insofar as our results seem to suggest that for the same
given stimulus, participants who experience chills will tend
to rate it as greater in valence and arousal. The emotional
drift induced by chills may explain the popularity of these
stimuli in popular culture and in the web media that they were
extracted from. In accordance with the existing literature, we
found demographic differences in chills frequency. We found
a significant difference in terms of age, as younger participants
had a greater chance of experiencing chills. As a limitation, we
note that this finding may be due to the age distribution in
our sample, as the use of YouTube is not equally distributed in
society (Auxier and Anderson,2021) and some of the content
is culture and age-specific (e.g., anime, motivation speech, and
films). Our results also confirm that Item 188 of the Revised
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FIGURE 5
Differences in experience arousal and valence ratings across ethnicities depending on whether participants experienced chills or not. It seems
that participants who reported chills show greater similarity in emotional ratings of the experience as compared to those who did not.
NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) is a good predictor of
chills (McCrae,2007). However, we did not find a significant
difference in terms of evaluating NEO score post exposure
to chills. Furthermore, we were not able to replicate prior
findings that chills vary with gender, nor did we find any ethnic
difference in chills. Interestingly, when examining differences
in emotion amongst various ethnicities, we found that the
means for each individual ethnicity, though initially significantly
different, tended to harmonize toward the same mean value.
The distribution observed in Figure 5 is likely due to the five
points scoring, however, we report this interesting pattern, as
worthy of further research into the emotional harmonization
of chills, i.e., their ability to synchronize emotional valence in
a group with initial disparate ratings—putting everyone on a
similar emotional level.
The capacity of chills stimuli to induce positive emotional
valence and greater arousal for the same stimulus regardless
of prior emotional states may be relevant for mental health
intervention (Khalsa et al.,2018), e.g., to influence negatively
valenced rumination in depression (Schoeller et al.,2022c), or
negative affective bias in schizophrenics. The neural correlates
of chills discussed in Blood and Zatorre (2001) and Salimpoor
et al. (2011) suggests a pattern of activity reminding of
euphoria in drug research, whereby ventral tegmental area
(VTA) neurons project to the nucleus accumbens and the
hippocampus in the limbic system while correlating with a
deactivation of the amygdala and orbito and ventromedial
prefrontal cortex (Blood and Zatorre,2001). A future research
question would be to assess whether the drift in arousal and
valence also correlates with reward-driven improvement in
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memory encoding, as suggested by studies on the role of VTA
dopaminergic projections to the hippocampus in encoding
emotional memories (Shohamy and Adcock,2010;Ripollés
et al.,2018). Our results mirror those of Ferreri and colleagues
on music and reward and the role of dopamine in the process
(Ferreri et al.,2013,2021;Ferreri and Rodriguez-Fornells,
2017,2022). Note that activity in the insular cortex during
the chills response speaks to the importance of interoception
(and peripheral signals) in the chills response. Hence, while this
study carried the inherent limitations of online experiments,
it would be of interest to replicate the present results using
peripheral measures as well as a wearable device to enhance
feeling of chills by simulating the somatic markers of chills
(Schoeller et al.,2019;Haar et al.,2020;Jain et al.,2022).
Following the embodied model of emotions (Pezzulo,2013),
we hypothesize that such manipulation of interoceptive signals
should influence further the emotional drift in valence and
arousal reported by participants in this study, in line with the
recent framework outlined in Schoeller et al. (2022a). Such
controlled manipulations could be useful for mood disorders
such as depression, specifically to address anhedonia symptoms
and reward sensitivity (Webb et al.,2022).
As the first study testing ChillsDB stimuli, a number of
limitations should be noted. We chose the top 50 videos of
ChillsDB based on how many mentions of dictionary elements.
Though specifically designed for this purpose ChillsDB is
indeed not exhaustive (or even representative of the gigantic
sum of data available on YouTube). Hence the results
reported here, though convenient for experimental purposes,
can and should be enriched by further studies. A further
limitation of this study is that all measures are obtained
through self-report. As emphasized previously, future studies
should include physiological measures [e.g., pupil size galvanic
skin response (GSR), heart rate (HR), etc.] to validate the
degree to which chilling experiences are actually induced by
these stimuli and confirm the present findings in terms of
change in arousal.
Data availability statement
The datasets presented in this study can be found in
online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories
and accession number(s) can be found below: https://doi.org/
10.7910/DVN/ADLSZE.
Ethics statement
The studies involving human participants were
reviewed and approved by the Committee on the Use
of Humans as Experimental Subjects at MIT. The
patients/participants provided their written informed consent
to participate in this study.
Author contributions
AJ and FS conceptualized the study and designed the
experiments and analyzed the results. GY and XH built
the code under the supervision of AJ and FS. All authors
participated equally in writing the manuscript and approved the
submitted version.
Funding
This research was partly supported by the Joy
Ventures Research Grant.
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the
absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the
authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated
organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the
reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or
claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed
or endorsed by the publisher.
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