ChillsDB — A Research Kit for Aesthetic Chills

Aesthetic chills have garnered increasing interest from researchers investigating their neurobiology and genetic basis. As a result, a growing number of scientists are looking to reliably induce chills in laboratory settings. Over the past ten years, our team has developed the scientific instrumentation to do exactly this. Today, we are making these tools freely accessible to researchers worldwide so that together, we can discover something new about consciousness and cognition.

Somatic Marker Validation

Data Sourcing Methodology

2.8M+

Comments analyzed across social media. Clips were sourced by scanning for self-reported somatic markers to establish a baseline elicitation probability prior to lab validation.

Top Sourced Stimulus	Total Comments	Somatic Markers
Ed Sheeran - Give Me Love	91,597	479
Hans Zimmer - Time (Inception)	40,173	432
Lana Del Rey - Once Upon A Dream	16,871	291
The Great Dictator Speech - Chaplin	17,633	215

The Library

Modality 01

Music

12 Stimuli

Includes live vocal performances, classical choral pieces (e.g., Allegri's Miserere mei, Deus), orchestral movie scores (Interstellar, Gladiator), and acoustic covers.

Modality 02

Films

22 Stimuli

Features specific climactic cinematic scenes, including battle sequences, character reveals, and emotional peaks (e.g., Jurassic Park, The Hobbit, Inception, Rocky).

Modality 03

Speech

22 Stimuli

Includes film monologues (The Great Dictator, Scent of a Woman) and real-world motivational addresses (Admiral McRaven, Denzel Washington, Rick Rigsby).

Modality 04

Anime

08 Stimuli

Specific scenes from animated series (Naruto, Dragon Ball Z) featuring high-stakes narrative moments, character sacrifices, and synchronized musical scores.

Protocol Integration

Compatible out-of-the-box.

Stimuli are provided in standardized formats with precise timestamping for event-related designs. Easily deployable across behavioral surveys and neuroimaging environments. Request the free kit to get the full metadata files and media package.

Qualtrics PsychoPy Google Forms fMRI EEG fNIRS Physio (ECG/EDA)

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Machine Learning & Synthesis

Prediction Engine

Match participants to chills stimuli

Co-developed with IACS

Our machine learning model evaluates participant inputs (personality, music-reward sensitivity, state affect) to calculate individual elicitation probabilities. Based on our predictive models published in PNAS Nexus, this API allows researchers to dynamically select the highest-yield stimulus per individual subject during an experiment.

Generative Pipeline

Create unique personalized stimuli

Offered by ReWire Neurotechnologies, Inc.

A separate generative pipeline capable of synthesizing bespoke, multimodal speech stimuli on demand. The system is engineered to target specific individual reward sensitivities and optimize the probability of eliciting a psychogenic shiver in real-time without relying on pre-existing library clips.

Publications & References

The ChillsDB kit is built upon the following peer-reviewed literature and open-source datasets. We ask that researchers utilizing the kit cite the relevant papers below.

ChillsDB: A Gold Standard for Aesthetic Chills Stimuli ↗

Schoeller, F., Jain, A., Horowitz, A. H., Yan, G., Hu, X., Maes, P., & Salomon, R. (2023) · Scientific Data (Nature), 10, 307.

ChillsDB 2.0: Individual Differences in Aesthetic Chills Among 2,900+ Southern California Participants ↗

Schoeller, F., Christov-Moore, L., Lynch, C., & Reggente, N. (2024) · Scientific Data (Nature).

Predicting peak emotional responses to music ↗

Schoeller, F. et al. (2024) · PNAS Nexus.

ChillsDB: an open-source database of chills-inducing stimuli ↗

Schoeller, F. et al. (2022) · Harvard Dataverse. Dataset record.

Get the Research Kit

Team

Felix Schoeller, PhD

Co-inventor of ChillsDB

Neuroscientist and founder of ReWire Neurotechnologies, working at the intersection of affective neuroscience, interoception, and emotional wellbeing.

Abhinandan Jain, PhD

Co-inventor of ChillsDB

Human-computer interaction researcher and founder of Nocturnal Health, building wearable interfaces that interact with the body's internal states.

Nicco Reggente, PhD

Co-inventor of the AI pipeline

Cognitive neuroscientist and Director at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, specializing in predictive modeling and neurotechnology.

ChillsDB: a research kit for aesthetic chills.

Advanced APIs for prediction & generation.