ChillsDB: A Gold Standard for Aesthetic Chills Stimuli

ChillsDB: A Gold Standard for Aesthetic Chills Stimuli is a work by Felix Schoeller (2023).

Core claims

• Schoeller and colleagues provide the first standardized database of stimuli reliably eliciting aesthetic chills, enabling cross-laboratory replication and systematic investigation of a phenomenon that had previously been studied with idiosyncratic, non-comparable stimulus sets.
• The database spans multiple modalities — music, film, speech, and visual art — and includes normative data on chill frequency, intensity, and phenomenological quality, establishing aesthetic chills as a robust, replicable psychophysiological event rather than a subjective curiosity.
• By validating chills as a measurable biomarker of peak aesthetic experience, ChillsDB positions the body’s involuntary response to beauty as a legitimate dependent variable for neuroscience, clinical psychology, and embodied aesthetics research.

Related questions

• Does the standardization of chill-inducing stimuli risk domesticating the phenomenon — selecting for reliable, moderate responses while excluding the rare, shattering encounters with beauty that depth psychology would consider most psychologically significant?
• How might ChillsDB be used to investigate individual differences in aesthetic sensitivity as a clinical variable — for instance, testing whether trauma survivors show reduced chill responsiveness as a marker of interoceptive disconnection?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-body/schoeller-chillsdb-gold-standard/

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