Artistic interests: why do some people get chills from music?

A song starts on the radio. The chorus builds, a voice breaks in just the right place, and suddenly you feel a shiver run down your neck and arms. Your skin turns to goosebumps.

The person next to you hardly notices the song.

Why does music, a painting or a view move some people physically, while others are left more or less untouched?

Part of the answer may lie in what psychologists call artistic interests. In the Big Five model, this is one of six facets of openness to experience. The facet describes how much a person values art and beauty, and how easily they are absorbed by aesthetic experiences, both in art and in nature.

What does artistic interests mean?

The name can be misleading. The facet is not about whether you paint, play an instrument or know a lot about art history. It is about how much beauty means to you, and how strongly you respond to it.

People who score high often recognise themselves in this:

• You think art matters, not only as decoration but as something meaningful.
• You notice beauty in things others walk past: light on a wall, the shape of a tree, a well-made sentence.
• You can become completely absorbed by music, a film or a landscape.
• You enjoy poetry, museums, concerts or theatre.
• Strong aesthetic experiences can move you physically.

A high score does not mean you are artistically talented or trained, although many high scorers are. Nor is it about good or bad taste.

The key is not what you like, but how much beauty matters to you, and how deeply you let it in.

Chills: a hallmark of openness across the world

The shiver many people feel when listening to music is often called aesthetic chills, or frisson.

The personality researcher Robert McCrae noticed that one single statement in a widely used personality test, which asks whether people have experienced such chills, was one of the best markers of openness to experience in American samples.

He then looked at data from 51 cultures in a large international project. In most of them, the same statement was again one of the best markers of openness. The phenomenon could also be expressed in all the languages that were examined.

McCrae concluded that aesthetic chills appear to be a universal emotional experience, and one of the clearest signs of an open personality.

It is not about which music you like

If chills are linked to openness, is it simply because open people listen to more complex music, like classical or jazz?

A study from 2011 examined exactly this. Young adults answered questions about chills, personality, music preferences and listening habits. Openness to experience was the strongest predictor of how often people got chills from music.

Openness did predict a preference for more reflective and complex genres. But the choice of genre did not in turn predict chills. What mattered was how people engaged with music in everyday life: those who listened more often and valued music more got chills more often.

In other words, it is not your playlist that gives you goosebumps, but the way you listen.

Want to know more about music taste? Read what your music taste says about your personality.

Measured in the lab, not just reported

A weakness of many studies is that they rely on what people say about themselves. A study from 2016 therefore tried to trigger chills directly.

One hundred college students completed a personality test and then listened to five pieces of music chosen because they often give people chills. The researchers measured chills both through self-report and through skin conductance, a physical measure of arousal.

Those who scored higher on openness experienced more chills. The link held for the overall trait and for five of the six openness facets, including the facet closest to artistic interests. The researchers suggest that how attentively people listen may matter more than previously thought.

What happens in the brain?

A classic brain imaging study from 2001 let participants bring their own music that reliably gave them chills. When the chills grew stronger, activity changed in brain regions linked to reward, emotion and arousal.

These are the same systems that respond to other strong pleasures, such as food and sex. The study did not measure personality, but it shows that intense aesthetic experiences are not just a matter of taste. They engage some of the most basic systems we have.

Appreciating art is not the same as making art

It is easy to assume that people with high artistic interests must be creative or artistic themselves. The research gives a more nuanced picture.

A study from 2016 with 1,035 participants found that openness, in the sense of engagement with perception, fantasy, aesthetics and emotion, predicted creative achievement in the arts. The more intellectual side of the trait, intellect, predicted creative achievement in the sciences instead.

So there is a link between aesthetic openness and artistic achievement. But the facet measures interest and responsiveness, not skill. You can be deeply moved by a concert without being able to play a note, and a skilled craftsperson can have a fairly practical relationship to beauty.

Artistic interests are also not the same as emotionality, which is about awareness of your own feelings in general, not specifically responses to art and beauty.

What does a high or low score mean?

High artistic interests

Beauty matters to you, and you are easily absorbed by art, music and nature. You may seek out concerts, exhibitions or scenic places, and you may react strongly when something touches you.

You may also be more sensitive to ugly or chaotic surroundings, and find it harder to ignore them.

Low artistic interests

You have a more practical relationship to art and aesthetics. You may enjoy a good film or song, but you do not seek out art for its own sake, and you are rarely moved physically by it.

That does not mean you lack feelings or depth. Many low scorers find meaning in other things, such as people, practical work, sport or solving concrete problems.

Both descriptions are about typical tendencies, not rules that hold in every situation.

In everyday life

• At work: High scorers often value aesthetics in their surroundings and in their work, from a well-designed presentation to a tidy piece of code. Design, culture and communication can be natural fields.
• In relationships: Differences here are common and rarely a problem. It can help to share experiences on each other's terms, such as a concert one time and a football match the next.
• At home: Interior design, light and music can matter more to high scorers than others might understand.
• In leisure time: Nature walks, museums, concerts and reading are typical sources of pleasure for high scorers.

Can artistic interests change?

Personality is fairly stable, but not fixed. A large meta-analysis from 2006 found that openness to experience on average increases during adolescence and decreases in old age.

The 2011 study suggests a practical point: how people engage with music was what linked openness to chills. That suggests that habits may matter. Many people discover that their interest in art grows when they get to know it better:

• Listen to music actively, without doing anything else at the same time.
• Visit an exhibition with a guide or audio guide that explains what you are looking at.
• Read a short poem slowly, aloud.
• Notice what you find beautiful in your everyday surroundings.

But there is no reason to force it. Low artistic interest is a perfectly valid way to be.

Frequently asked questions

Is it normal never to get chills from music?

Yes. Not everyone experiences aesthetic chills, and that is not a sign that anything is wrong. Research suggests that chills are linked to openness and to how actively people listen, not to how much they appreciate music in general.

Do I need to be artistic to score high?

No. The facet measures interest in and responsiveness to art and beauty, not artistic talent or training.

Does a high score mean I have good taste?

No. The facet says nothing about which art or music you like, only how much art and beauty mean to you.

How is artistic interests measured in the Big Five test?

Our test is based on the IPIP-NEO-120, where each facet is measured with four statements. For artistic interests, they are about believing in the importance of art, seeing beauty that others might not notice, and, scored in reverse, not liking poetry and not enjoying art museums. Read the score as a sign of a pattern, not as a complete description of you.

Find out where you score

Artistic interests is only one of the six facets of openness to experience. You can score high here and still be low on imagination or liberalism.

Take the Big Five test and see your whole profile, with all 30 facets.

Sources

• McCrae, R. R. (2007). Aesthetic chills as a universal marker of openness to experience. Motivation and Emotion, 31(1), 5–11.
• Nusbaum, E. C. & Silvia, P. J. (2011). Shivers and timbres: Personality and the experience of chills from music. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2(2), 199–204.
• Colver, M. C. & El-Alayli, A. (2016). Getting aesthetic chills from music: The connection between openness to experience and frisson. Psychology of Music, 44(3), 413–427.
• Blood, A. J. & Zatorre, R. J. (2001). Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(20), 11818–11823.
• Kaufman, S. B., Quilty, L. C., Grazioplene, R. G., Hirsh, J. B., Gray, J. R., Peterson, J. B. & DeYoung, C. G. (2016). Openness to experience and intellect differentially predict creative achievement in the arts and sciences. Journal of Personality, 84(2), 248–258.
• Roberts, B. W., Walton, K. E. & Viechtbauer, W. (2006). Patterns of mean-level change in personality traits across the life course: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 132(1), 1–25.
• Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78–89.