If a song has ever made your skin prickle or sent a shiver down your back, you have felt what researchers call frisson, also known as aesthetic chills. It is a short burst of pleasure, usually lasting a few seconds, that can come with goosebumps and tingling. It is common but not universal, and a 2016 study linked it to a personality trait called openness to experience, especially to an active, absorbed imagination. Here is what that research found, what is happening in the brain, and what a lack of chills does and does not mean.
What frisson is
The word comes from the French for "shiver". Psychologists describe frisson as a psychophysiological response to something rewarding: the body reacts as if it were cold or startled, but the feeling is pleasant. Typical signs include chills, a tingling scalp or spine, raised hairs on the arms and sometimes dilated pupils.
Music is the most common trigger, but not the only one. People report chills while watching a moving film scene, looking at a striking painting, hearing a powerful speech or being touched by someone they love. The writer Mitchell Colver, who studied the effect, has listed many of these triggers in his own popular writing about the research.
How many people get it? Estimates vary widely depending on how studies ask the question. A figure of "about two-thirds of people" is often repeated, including by Colver, but it is a rough summary of earlier surveys, not a worldwide count. What is clear is that some people feel chills often, some rarely, and some never.
The 2016 study on personality and chills
Colver, then a doctoral student at Utah State University, and Amani El-Alayli of Eastern Washington University published their study in the journal Psychology of Music in 2016. They wanted to know whether certain kinds of people are more prone to frisson, and why.
Their team recruited 113 college students, of whom 97 made it into the final analysis. Each completed a standard personality questionnaire, then listened to five pieces of music chosen because each contained at least one climactic or surprising passage likely to produce chills. Popular accounts of the study mention selections from Air Supply, Hans Zimmer and Chopin among them. While listening, participants wore sensors measuring galvanic skin response, a small change in the skin's electrical conductance that signals physical arousal, and pressed a button whenever they felt a chill.
The result: people who scored higher on openness to experience reported chills more often. Openness is one of the "Big Five" personality traits and describes people who tend to be curious, imaginative, sensitive to beauty and keen on new experiences and ideas.
Why imagination mattered most
Openness has several facets, including appreciation of aesthetics, openness to feelings and openness to ideas. The most interesting finding was which one did the work. Of all the facets, only fantasy, meaning a rich and active inner world of imagination, made a unique contribution to predicting chills.
The authors read this as a sign that frisson is not only an emotional reaction but also a cognitive one. People who mentally lean into music, picture scenes, anticipate where a melody is heading and get absorbed in the sound seem more likely to be caught by its peaks. According to PsyPost's summary, the researchers suggested that listeners might even be able to experience chills more readily by putting more cognitive effort into how they listen.
In plain terms: engaging with music actively, rather than letting it play in the background, appears to raise the odds of that shiver.
What happens in the brain and body
Other research helps explain the mechanism. In a well-known 2001 brain-imaging study, Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre found that the intensity of musical chills tracked activity in the ventral striatum, orbitofrontal cortex, insula and anterior cingulate, regions involved in reward and emotion. Later work linked music-induced chills to dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens and caudate nucleus, the same reward circuitry engaged by food and other pleasures.
A 2016 study by Matthew Sachs and colleagues found that people who regularly get chills had stronger white-matter connections between the auditory regions of the brain, the anterior insula and areas that process reward and emotion. That suggests some people are, in a sense, better wired to turn sound into feeling.
The music itself matters too. Passages that tend to produce chills often contain a surprise: a sudden change in loudness, an unexpected harmony, a key change, a voice entering after silence, or an appoggiatura, a note that clashes briefly with the harmony before resolving. Our brains constantly predict what comes next in a piece, and a moment that breaks the prediction in a satisfying way seems to be part of the trigger.
What chills do not tell you about yourself
It is tempting to treat frisson as a personality test, and many viral articles did just that, implying that people who get chills are deeper, smarter or more emotional. The research does not support that.
The 2016 study found an association across a group of students. It does not mean that any single listener who feels a chill has a particular personality, or that someone who never feels one lacks imagination or sensitivity. Plenty of people are deeply moved by music without any physical shiver. Mood, fatigue, familiarity with a piece, volume and setting all change the response from one day to the next.
Nor is a chill a sign of intelligence or superior musical understanding. Musicians and non-musicians both report it, and the same person can feel it during a pop ballad one day and nothing during a symphony the next.
How to notice your own response
If you are curious about your own chills, try a simple listening exercise rather than a test:
- Pick a piece that has moved you before and listen without distractions, ideally on headphones.
- Notice exactly where the shiver arrives: a voice entering, a pause, a return of a familiar melody, a sudden swell.
- Listen again and see whether expecting the moment makes it stronger, weaker or different.
- Compare notes with a friend. Different people often react to different moments, which says more about memory and association than about who is "right".
The point is not to collect chills but to listen more closely. That kind of absorbed attention is exactly what the research links to frisson, and it tends to make music more rewarding whether or not your skin reacts.
Sources: Colver, M. C. and El-Alayli, A. (2016), Psychology of Music; PsyPost summary of the study; Wikipedia: Frisson (Blood & Zatorre 2001; Sachs et al. 2016). Original post by Raven Fon via I Heart Intelligence.
So it means INTP personality type.
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