Abstract :
Aesthetic chills are transient emotional responses
to music or other experiences of beauty. Item 188 of the Revised
NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) asks respondents
if they have experienced these chills, and in American
samples it is one of the best definers of Openness to Experience,
one of the five basic personality factors. As part
of the NEO-PI-R, the item has been translated into over 40
languages, and an examination of back-translations suggests
that the phenomenon can be expressed in all the languages
examined. Data from the Personality Profiles of Cultures
Project show that Item 188 is one of the best definers of
Openness in most of the 51 cultures examined. Aesthetic
chills appear to be a universal emotional experience, although
the functions they serve and the mechanisms that
account for them remain to be discovered.
