On personality and piloerection: Individual differences in aesthetic chills and other unusual aesthetic experiences.

Abstract

Relatively little is known about aesthetic chills, the experience of goose bumps and shivers in response to the arts. The present study explored how often people report such experiences and what people who often experience them are like. After noting which domain of the arts they encountered most often in daily life, young adults (n = 188) rated how often they experienced aesthetic chills and related states. Latent variable models suggested three latent factors—aesthetic chills, feeling touched, and absorption—that shared a higher-order factor. As expected, people high in openness to experience and expertise in the arts consistently reported experiencing aesthetic chills more often. The Big Five personality factors accounted for about half of the variance, whereas cognitive and demographic variables were relatively unimportant. The individual-differences approach thus seems like a promising complement to experimental work on aesthetic chills.