Chills in Music: A Systematic Review.

Chills are a psychophysiological response that can be experienced when listening to music. They have been of particular interest in scientific research on music because of their association with emotion and pleasure. However, with the literature doubling in size since the last review on the subject, it has become increasingly difficult to gain a broad and integrated understanding of the empirical and theoretical research on music-evoked chills (MECs). Notably, crucial questions remain about the criteria that are necessary and sufficient to characterize MECs. In this article, we systematically review the literature on MECs to reconcile diverging opinions and empirical findings on their psychological nature, and to develop a preliminary model that provides a robust framework for future hypothesis-driven research. We explore the context behind current research on MECs, discuss how they relate to emotional and esthetic responses, assess current empirical measures and paradigms, summarize their physiological and neural correlates, categorize their possible stimulus-driven elicitors, examine how they are affected by individual differences, and evaluate theoretical perspectives about their potential evolutionary causes. We conclude by providing a preliminary model of MECs that suggests different pathways for the experience of MECs, a dataset listing pieces of music reported to elicit MECs in the reviewed literature, and a set of open issues, hypotheses, and recommended approaches for future research. Public Significance Statement: Many people experience pleasurable physical sensations during musical listening, commonly referred to as chills. Although there is a fast-growing body of research on chills, their underlying psychological basis remains obscure, partly due to the lack of an integrated theoretical framework for understanding them and generating hypotheses. Our systematic review of 167 research reports on chills from 1980 to 2020 allows us to synthesize a preliminary model of music-evoked chills, which allows for three distinct underlying psychological mechanisms based, respectively, on arousal, expectation, and emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]