A growing body of genetic research now links the goosebumps people feel during a powerful song or a striking painting to inherited biological traits, not just personal taste. Multiple large-scale twin and cohort studies from European registries have quantified how much of that “chills” response traces back to DNA, with heritability estimates ranging from 29% to 54% depending on the type of aesthetic experience measured. The findings carry practical weight: as consumer genomics companies increasingly survey users about emotional responses, the science behind aesthetic chills is moving from lab curiosity toward potential applications in personalized mental health care.
How Heritable Are Aesthetic Chills?
The strongest evidence that genes shape aesthetic chills comes from studies that compare relatives and twins. A genomics analysis of a genotyped cohort of approximately 15,606 people from the northern Netherlands found that familial relatedness accounts for up to roughly 29% of the variation in self-reported chills from music and visual art. Because the cohort included partly related individuals rather than only identical twins, that estimate captures both shared genetics and shared family environment, making it a conservative floor for the genetic contribution alone. The authors emphasized that even this modest-sounding fraction represents a substantial biological influence once measurement error and the crudeness of self-report items are taken into account.
A separate twin analysis using the Netherlands Twin Register sharpened the picture. That study used a single item from a widely adopted personality inventory, NEO-FFI Item 43, which asks whether poetry or art produces chills, and reported an additive genetic component of about 36% for individual differences in chills proneness. A review in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience highlighted this figure as evidence that genetic factors facilitate intense emotional responses to aesthetic stimuli rather than merely shaping general personality traits. Taken together, these results suggest that roughly a third of the reason one person tears up at a symphony while another feels nothing can be traced to inherited biology rather than upbringing or exposure, while leaving ample room for learning, culture, and individual life history to do the rest.
Music Reward Has Its Own Genetic Pathway
If chills from art and poetry are partly genetic, the same should hold for the pleasure people derive specifically from music. A large twin study drawing on the Swedish Twin Registry and approximately 9,169 participants tested that idea using the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, a validated scale that measures how much reward a person gets from listening to, anticipating, and moving to music. The analysis estimated that up to 54% of variability in music reward sensitivity is attributable to genetic effects, a figure notably higher than the 29% to 36% range found for broader aesthetic chills. That gap suggests that while chills are one visible tip of the iceberg, deeper dispositions toward musical enjoyment may be even more tightly rooted in biology.
What makes that result especially telling is a second finding from the same study: much of the genetic influence on music reward operates independently of general reward sensitivity. In other words, the genes that make a person susceptible to musical pleasure are not simply the same ones that make chocolate or a pay raise feel good. Music appears to recruit a partly distinct genetic architecture, which helps explain why some people can be indifferent to dessert yet profoundly moved by a minor chord. This separation also raises the possibility that music-based therapies could target biological pathways that standard reward-focused treatments miss, offering a rationale for tailoring interventions to those whose genomes predispose them to particularly strong or weak responses to sound.
What Happens in the Brain During Chills
Genetics sets the stage, but neuroimaging research reveals the specific brain chemistry that plays out when chills arrive. A PET imaging study that measured cerebral blood flow while participants listened to self-selected chill-inducing music found that chill intensity correlated with activity changes in brain regions tied to reward, motivation, emotion, and arousal. Increased activation in structures such as the ventral striatum and orbitofrontal cortex overlapped heavily with circuits recruited by food, sex, and addictive drugs, placing music squarely inside the brain’s core pleasure machinery, rather than in a separate “aesthetic” system. These findings reinforced behavioral reports that chills feel viscerally rewarding, not merely intellectually interesting.
Later work using a different PET tracer, [11C]raclopride, directly measured endogenous dopamine release during pleasurable music listening. That study also used fMRI to tease apart two distinct phases of the experience: anticipation, which engaged the caudate nucleus as listeners waited for a favorite musical moment, and the peak emotional response itself, which shifted activity to the nucleus accumbens and related reward structures. A high-density EEG experiment added a cortical layer to this picture, showing that chills episodes produce oscillatory patterns over temporal and frontal regions that track moment-to-moment pleasure ratings. Together, these imaging and electrophysiology results map a chain from dopamine surge to cortical signature that could, in principle, be modulated by the genetic variants identified in twin studies, offering a bridge from DNA to subjective goosebumps.
Why Most Evidence Comes From European Registries
A significant limitation runs through nearly all of this research: the major cohort and twin studies draw exclusively from Dutch and Swedish population registries. The northern Netherlands cohort and the Netherlands Twin Register are relatively homogeneous in ancestry, and the Swedish Twin Registry, while large, shares similar demographic constraints. No primary genomic dataset of comparable size has yet examined aesthetic chills proneness in non-European populations, which means the heritability estimates of 29%, 36%, and 54% might not generalize across different ancestral backgrounds or cultural contexts. Cultural norms around music, religion, and emotional expression could interact with genetic predispositions in ways that either amplify or dampen chills, but current designs are poorly equipped to detect those interactions.
Efforts to broaden the evidence base are underway. A validated database of chills-inducing stimuli spanning music, film, and speech reported elicitation probabilities of 0.8 or higher in a U.S. population sample and made its materials openly accessible through repositories including Harvard Dataverse, enabling researchers worldwide to test the same clips in new groups. By pairing such standardized stimuli with genotyped cohorts from African, Asian, and Latin American populations, future studies could ask whether the same genetic factors predict chills across cultures or whether distinct variants emerge in different musical and aesthetic traditions. Until then, the field must treat current estimates as strong but geographically narrow signals rather than universal numbers.
From Lab Finding to Personal Genomics
Consumer DNA testing has already begun to brush up against this science, even if most companies do not yet offer explicit “chills” reports. As one Georgetown University neuroscientist noted in commentary on emerging trait reports, survey items about music enjoyment, emotional sensitivity, and social bonding are now common in commercial questionnaires and can be linked back to genome-wide data. In principle, the same analytic tools used in academic twin research could generate polygenic scores that predict who is most likely to experience intense aesthetic responses, though current studies are far from identifying specific variants with large, reliable effects. Any commercial interpretation would therefore need to emphasize probabilities and modest effect sizes rather than deterministic claims about who can or cannot feel moved by art.
Clinical applications are more speculative but potentially more consequential. Because music and other aesthetic experiences tap into dopamine-rich reward circuits, genetically informed profiles of chills proneness and music reward sensitivity could one day help tailor non-pharmacological treatments for depression, anxiety, or anhedonia. Individuals whose genomes predispose them to strong musical reward might benefit disproportionately from music-based therapy or structured listening programs, while those with weaker predispositions might require different sensory or social interventions. For now, the most robust conclusion is that aesthetic chills are neither mystical quirks nor purely learned reactions: they emerge from an interplay of inherited biology, brain chemistry, and culture that scientists are only beginning to chart, and that is already reshaping how we think about the art that moves us.
More from Morning Overview
*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
