Thrills, Chills, Frissons, and Skin Orgasms: Toward a Psychophysiology of Aesthetic Chills

Thrills, Chills, Frissons, and Skin Orgasms: Toward a Psychophysiology of Aesthetic Chills is a work by Luke Harrison (2014).

Core claims

• Harrison and Loui consolidate the scattered terminology of aesthetic chills — frissons, thrills, skin orgasms, piloerection — into a unified psychophysiological framework, arguing that these diverse labels refer to a single class of embodied aesthetic response.
• The paper establishes that aesthetic chills are measurable through convergent physiological markers (galvanic skin response, piloerection, heart rate changes) and are reliably elicited by specific acoustic features including unexpected harmonic shifts, crescendos, and the entry of new timbral elements.
• By linking aesthetic chills to dopaminergic reward circuitry, the paper positions embodied aesthetic experience as neurobiologically continuous with other forms of anticipatory pleasure, raising questions about whether the soul’s response to beauty operates through the same circuits as its response to desire.

Related questions

• If aesthetic chills engage the same dopaminergic reward pathways as anticipatory desire, what does this imply for the depth psychological claim that beauty and eros are archetypal siblings — that the soul’s shiver before a musical passage and its longing before a beloved share a common root?
• How does the piloerection response during aesthetic chills relate to van der Kolk’s account of the body as a site of autonomous meaning-making that bypasses cognitive processing?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-body/harrison-thrills-chills-frissons/

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