Genetic differences may shape emotional reactions to art

Why do some people feel chills when listening to music, reading poetry, or viewing a powerful work of art, while others do not? New research by Giacomo Bignardi and his colleagues from Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (MPI) published in PLOS Genetics reveals that part of the answer lies in our genes.

Charles Darwin once described how hearing an anthem in King’s College Chapel gave him “intense pleasure so that [his] backbone would sometimes shiver.” Vladimir Nabokov (despite his notorious dislike for music) later celebrated the same sensation, calling it ‘the telltale tingle’ required to truly appreciate literary genius. Thanks to Lifelines, a large, multi-generational cohort study of individuals from the northern Netherlands, MPI researchers were able to gather and analyze data on emotional reactions to cultural experiences from over 15,500 participants with available genetic information. The study focused on ‘aesthetic chills’: those sometime goosebump-inducing moments often triggered by art, music, or literature.

Aesthetic chills

Aesthetic chills are moments of peak pleasure often accompanied by goosebumps or shivers. Because they are clear, measurable events that link subjective emotional experience with bodily responses, scientists have increasingly used them as a model for studying how humans respond to art. Previous research has shown that chills triggered by music and poetry engage neural systems similar to those involved in processing biologically meaningful stimuli, and that stable individual differences in chills correspond to measurable variation in physiology and brain function.

Building on this foundation, the new study analyzed genetic data to examine whether DNA variation helps explain why some individuals are especially prone to these reactions.

Family-linked factors

The researchers found that approximately 30% of the variation in experiencing chills is related to family-linked factors. About one-quarter of this familial influence is attributable to common genetic variants, demonstrating a significant genetic contribution to emotional sensitivity to art.

Some genetic influences were shared across music, poetry, and visual art, and were associated with broader personality traits such as openness to experience, including general artistic engagement. Other genetic effects appeared to be not shared across artistic domains, suggesting that different biological mechanisms may shape how people respond to music versus poetry or visual art.

These findings suggest that genetics may offer an additional way to better understand why people can sometimes subjectively experience the same sensory world so differently. However, much work remains to clarify how the genetic underpinnings of these experiences interact with environmental exposure and social dynamics.”

Giacomo Bignardi, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

By demonstrating that genetics plays a meaningful role in proneness to chills from visual art, poetry and music, the study opens the door to future research on the biological foundations of emotional experience, and why art impacts some people – quite literally – to their core.