Jolie Elizabeth Scalfano • 9 months ago

Frisson is a physically felt signature of an emotion, a somatic marker. Like nausea and disgust, or a rapid heartbeat and anxiety, this feeling in the body coincides with an emotion in the mind (and thus makes the body-mind distinction much more blurry). The specific somatic marker of frisson is experimentally tied to peak emotional experiences and the most meaningful moments during exposure to different stimuli, such as  songs or speeches or art pieces. And amazingly, aesthetic chills seem to be an almost universal marker of peak emotional experiences across a wide range of cultures and continents. This universality is really rare—usually, expressions of emotion are quite different across cultural contexts—and this means that we can potentially use chills as a way to study emotion in the body in diverse peoples and places. We have a remarkable embodied feeling (a somatic marker) which is tied to this abstract emotion (meaningful moments), as if we could reach out and directly touch 'meaning-making'.