Here's a Database of Media Scientifically Verified to Give You the Chills
affective-computingemotionneurosciencechillsmental-health
Abstraction: Open database of validated chill-inducing audiovisual stimuli for research
Key points:
- ChillsDB is an open-source Harvard Dataverse repository of validated audiovisual stimuli (music, film, speech) that reliably elicit physiological chills in US populations
- Built by researchers at MIT Media Lab, Gonda Brain Research Centre (Israel), and Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies (California)
- Top 50 validated clips were tested on 600+ participants via crowdsourcing; those experiencing chills showed significantly more positive emotional valence and greater arousal
- Authors argue chills stimuli could be applied to mental health interventions — e.g., counteracting negative rumination in depression
- Team is exploring neuromodulation (low-intensity focused ultrasound) to artificially elicit chills as a novel depression treatment
Connections: Mit Media Lab · Affective Computing · Emotion Recognition