Distinct Varieties of Aesthetic Chills in Response to Multimedia Stimuli

Distinct Varieties of Aesthetic Chills in Response to Multimedia Stimuli is a work by Scott Bannister (2019).

Core claims

• Bannister identifies at least three phenomenologically distinct varieties of aesthetic chills — piloerection-dominant, shiver-dominant, and a mixed type — challenging the assumption that all chills represent a single psychophysiological event.
• Different stimulus modalities (music, film, speech, visual art) elicit different chill profiles, suggesting that the body discriminates between types of aesthetic encounter at a level of specificity that subjective report alone cannot capture.
• The paper’s differentiation of chill types parallels depth psychology’s insistence that not all numinous encounters are equivalent — the tremendum and the fascinans produce qualitatively different somatic signatures, not merely different intensities of the same response.

Related questions

• If different types of aesthetic chills correspond to qualitatively different modes of embodied aesthetic response, what does this imply for the depth psychological claim that the body possesses its own form of discriminating intelligence — a somatic feeling function?
• Could Bannister’s chill typology be mapped onto Jung’s four functions of consciousness, with piloerection corresponding to sensation’s raw registering, shivers to intuition’s anticipatory recognition, and mixed responses to the feeling function’s evaluative complexity?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-body/bannister-aesthetic-chills-multimedia/

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