Approximatively 5% of listeners experience very intense emotional feelings while listening to music. Luke Harrison and Psyche Loui from the Department of Psychology, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA just published their results in an article „Thrills, chills, frissons, and skin orgasms: toward an integrative model of transcendent psychophysiological experiences in music“. They define the phenomenon like this: „It is this issue of cultural association that has disqualified the oft-referenced, but rarely used term, ‘skin orgasm’, despite its uniquely accurate description of the spectrum of musically induced emotional phenomena. The term implies a pleasurable sensation that is paradoxically both universal and variable. It affects different parts of the body depending on the person and circumstances of induction, and retains similar sensory, evaluative, and affective biological and psychological components to sexual orgasm.
Read the entire study here.
