ChillsDB, A gold standard for aesthetic chills stimuli
Félix Schoeller, Abhinandan Jain, Adam Haar Horowitz, Grace Yan, Xiaoxiao Hu, Pattie Maes, Roy Salomon
Abstract
We introduce ChillsDB, the first validated database of audiovisual stimuli eliciting aesthetic chills (goosebumps, psychogenic shivers) in a US population. To discover chills stimuli “in the wild”, we devised a bottom-up, ecologically-valid method consisting in searching for mentions of the emotion's somatic markers in user comments throughout social media platforms (YouTube and Reddit). We successfully captured 204 chills-eliciting videos of three categories: music, film, and speech. We then tested the top 50 videos in the database on 600+ participants and validated a gold standard of 10 stimuli with a .9 probability of generating chills. All ChillsDB tools and data are fully available on GitHub and PhysioNet for researchers to be able to contribute and perform further analysis.