Distinct Varieties of Aesthetic Chills in Response to Multimedia Stimuli

Not All Shivers Are Equal

Bannister’s 2019 paper introduces a corrective that the aesthetic chills literature had needed: phenomenological differentiation. Previous research, including Harrison and Loui’s influential 2014 review, treated aesthetic chills as a unitary phenomenon — a single psychophysiological response varying only in intensity. Bannister demonstrates that the reality is more complex. Through large-scale survey data and physiological measurement, he identifies at least three distinct patterns of chills response: those dominated by piloerection (goosebumps), those dominated by shivers traveling along the spine or across the scalp, and mixed presentations combining both. These are not random variations but systematic: different stimulus types — music versus film versus spoken word versus visual art — tend to elicit different chill profiles. The body, it appears, does not respond to all forms of beauty in the same way. It differentiates.

The Body’s Aesthetic Taxonomy

This finding carries significant implications for depth psychology’s account of embodied intelligence. If the body produces qualitatively different somatic responses to different modalities of aesthetic encounter, then it possesses what can only be called a discriminating function — an evaluative capacity that operates below the threshold of conscious awareness. Jung’s feeling function, the most misunderstood of the four functions of consciousness, performs precisely this work: it evaluates experience according to its qualitative worth, distinguishing not just between pleasant and unpleasant but between types and degrees of value. Bannister’s data suggest that this discriminating capacity has a somatic dimension. The body’s piloerection in response to a musical crescendo is not the same as its shiver in response to a poetic image, and the difference is not random but meaningful — encoded in the specific pattern of autonomic activation that each stimulus type provokes.

The Tremendum and the Fascinans in the Flesh

Rudolf Otto’s phenomenology of the numinous distinguished between the tremendum — the overwhelming, terrifying, wholly-other dimension of the sacred — and the fascinans — its attractive, beautiful, alluring face. If Bannister’s chill varieties map onto distinct aesthetic-emotional modes, then the body may be registering at a physiological level what Otto described phenomenologically: the numinous is not one thing but a complex of qualitatively different encounters, each producing its own somatic signature. The shiver that travels down the spine during a piece of music may correspond to the fascinans — beauty drawing the soul forward. The sudden piloerection before a vast natural landscape may correspond to the tremendum — the organism’s hair literally standing on end in the presence of something that exceeds its capacity for assimilation. These correspondences are speculative but not arbitrary; they follow directly from the paper’s demonstration that the body produces patterned, differentiated responses to different aesthetic encounters.

From Measurement to Meaning

Bannister’s contribution advances the field by refusing to let aesthetic chills collapse into a single metric. The clinical consequence is that somatic responses to beauty — whether in art therapy, music therapy, or the ordinary encounters of daily life — deserve close phenomenological attention. The body is not simply saying “this is beautiful”; it is saying something more specific, more differentiated, more diagnostically useful than current therapeutic models acknowledge. For a depth psychology committed to the body’s intelligence, Bannister provides the empirical warrant to listen more carefully to what the flesh is saying.