The Seba library treats Piloerection in 6 passages, across 5 authors (including Panksepp, Jaak, Menninghaus, Winfried, Khalsa, Sahib S.).
laterally directed aggressive postures called "side-prancing," commonly accompanied by piloerection. These postures essentially never occur during social play.
Panksepp deploys piloerection as a behavioral diagnostic criterion separating genuine aggressive arousal from play-fighting in rats, grounding it in the activation of distinct RAGE-system circuitry.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998thesis
Tears falling on goosebumps: Co-occurrence of emotional lacrimation and emotional piloerection indicates a psychophysiological climax in emotional arousal.
Menninghaus cites Wassiliwizky et al.'s finding that the simultaneous occurrence of tears and piloerection marks a peak physiological event in aesthetic emotional experience.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015thesis
there are few observable interoceptive signs (e. g., heart rate, respiration rate, pupillary dilation, flushing, perspiration, piloerection, nociceptive reflexes)
Khalsa classifies piloerection among the rare clinically visible signs of interoceptive state, positioning it as a somatic surface event that renders otherwise imperceptible autonomic processes observable.
, Interoception and Mental Health: A Roadmap, 2018supporting
there are few observable interoceptive signs (e. g., heart rate, respiration rate, pupillary dilation, flushing, perspiration, piloerection, nociceptive reflexes)
Reiterating Khalsa's framework, piloerection is catalogued as one of the scant externally legible markers of interoceptive processing, bridging autonomic activity and clinical observation.
, Interoception and Mental Health: A Roadmap, 2018supporting
Benedek M, Kaernbach C. Physiological correlates and emotional specificity of human piloerection. Biological Psychology. 2011; 86(3): 320–329.
Bannister's reference to Benedek and Kaernbach's study anchors the aesthetic-chills literature to the dedicated empirical investigation of piloerection's emotional specificity and physiological correlates.
, Distinct varieties of aesthetic chills in response to multimedia, 2019supporting
A second kind of chills is a tingling sensation in the arms, shoulders, back of the ne
Keltner implicitly invokes the phenomenology of piloerection — goosebumps and tingling — as one of two distinct bodily signatures of chills, differentiating awe-related somatic responses from those accompanying dread.
, Awe The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can, 2023aside