Aesthetic Chills as a Universal Marker of Openness to Experience

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. Robert R. McCrae receives royalties from the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R). This research was supported in part by the Intramural Research Program, NIH, National Institute on Aging. I thank the translators and back-translators of the NEO-PI-R for their contributions to this research; my collaborators in the Personality Profiles of Cultures Project for supplying data; and Frank J. Sulloway for information on Darwin’s aesthetic experience. NEO-PI-R items reproduced by special permission of the Publisher, Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc., 16204 North Florida Avenue, Lutz, Florida 33549, from the Revised NEO Personality Inventory by Paul T. Costa, Jr., and Robert R. McCrae. Copyright 1978, 1985, 1989, 1991, 1992 by Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc. (PAR). Further reproduction is prohibited without permission of PAR. R. R. McCrae ( ) Laboratory of Personality and Cognition, Gerontology Research Center, National Institute on Aging, Box #03, 5600 Nathan Shock Drive, Baltimore, MD 21224-6825, USA e-mail: [email protected]