In the name of science, Todd Thrash isn’t above scaring the bejesus out of people.
Or rendering them teary-eyed, awed or sentimental.
An associate professor of psychology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Thrash studies “the chills” — that spine-tingly sensation elicited by a wide range of human emotions, from fear to revelation to sexual attraction.
His research was inspired in part by his own experiences, and by the fact there’s still so little research on the topic.
“I was noticing that I got chills pretty frequently and didn’t really have a way of understanding what was happening at those moments,” Thrash said. “And one thing I noticed was, these would be very important moments — times when I experienced an epiphany or awe or horror or some other kind of strong emotion. So even though it’s an obscure topic and kind of a strange bodily response, it occurs during very important emotional experiences. And it seemed to me that it’s time for researchers to start to take the concept seriously.”
Horror and poetry
His serious research can look unserious at times, especially when he asks students to watch clips from hair-raising movies, for instance, in order to gather their feedback or measure their goose bumps, or asks students to read poetry and rate its tingle power.
One chilling video clip was taken from “Nip/Tuck,” a television series about cosmetic surgery. In one episode, Thrash said, a woman undergoing surgery hadn’t been fully anesthetized, but her surgeons were blissfully unaware.
“In her own mind, she’s screaming,” Thrash said. “But the doctors don’t hear her. Basically, you’re seeing torture, but the doctors have pleasant emotions on their faces and they’re just chatting away.”
For such clips, he has largely relied on students self-reporting their feelings. But now he’s also adapted a German monitoring device that he calls the “Goose Caboose” to gather objective empirical evidence.
Will Belzak, a 24-year-old graduate student, recently demonstrated the device, which consists of a hollow box that attaches to a subject’s forearm as he watches video clips. The box is fitted with LED lights on either side and a small webcam inside to capture the shadows that goose bumps cast when they erupt on the subject’s skin.
In other research currently under review for publication, Thrash said, 200 students were asked to write poetry, then describe how inspired they were at the time. Afterward, 200 other students were asked to read those poems.
“What we found is when writers are more inspired, they are more likely to write things that are more likely to give readers the chills,” Thrash said. “Now, this is striking because there’s no contact between writers and readers. The writer privately has these feelings of inspiration that they report on the questionnaire, (then) they write poems that are capable of giving people goose bumps and shivers.
“What’s interesting about these data,” he added, “is that there’s some consistency across people about what they find equally important and moving. It’s the inspired poems that evoke chills.”
‘Goosetingles’ and ‘coldshivers’
What he’s deduced since he launched his research about five years ago is that “the chills” break down into four different bodily sensations: goose bumps, tingling, shivers and coldness. No one had attempted to measure those sensations separately before, he said.
Two sensations — goose bumps and tingling — are closely correlated and associated with pleasant emotions. They’re elicited by such things as listening to certain music, sexual arousal or watching someone help a person in need. Thrash calls those “goosetingles.”
Shivers and coldness are likewise correlated and associated with unpleasant emotions elicited by an imminent threat by a psychopath, for instance, the sense of a ghostly presence or a feeling of abandonment. Those he calls “coldshivers.”
Belzak said one of his goals as he assists in such research is to chase down theories about why we get goosetingles and coldshivers in the first place and what they can teach us.
“One of them may be a signaling function to, maybe, your greatest hopes in life or your greatest fears in life,” Belzak said. “When you see something positive and you might have these tingling sensations and this might trigger something inside of you to say, ‘This is something that’s important to me. This is what I hope most for.’ Whereas, where you have a shiver down your spine, it might be in reaction to something you fear most in life, whether it’s mortality or torture — something horrible.”
One of Thrash’s former graduate students, Laura Maruskin, co-authored a paper with him on “The Chills as a Psychological Construct” that appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2012.
“We think chills are important because they may signal some of the most poignant emotional encounters in our lives — a way in which our bodies alert us to important events,” Maruskin said.
Now a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, she’s studying the universality of chills in different cultures, including China, Spain and Japan.
What’s good, what’s possible
For now, Thrash said he’s most focused on basic research itself, but does foresee practical applications of the chills to better understand ourselves and each other.
The ability to get the chills from aesthetics, for instance, is almost a defining characteristic of a major dimension of personality called openness to experience, he said.
The chills could help regulate social behavior — goad us to avoid coldshiver experiences and embrace goosetingle ones.
They could help illuminate emotional experiences in others based on their bodily sensations, and not on what they’re consciously choosing to reveal.
And they could enlighten us about our own deep-seated, unconscious motivations, he said.
“Chills experiences seem to be moments when we’re grounded again,” Thrash said. “When we are reminded of the kinds of concerns that have been important to the evolution of humans. And, in some cases, this reminds us of the things that are deeply threatening for our existence. Or, in other cases, remind us of what’s good and what’s possible.”
Dietrich can be reached by phone at 757-247-7892.
