Genetic underpinnings of chills from art and music

Art can evoke strong emotional responses in humans. Here, we examine genetic contributions to chills, a 
marker of such responses. We gather self-reports from a genotyped sample of thousands of partly related 
individuals from the Netherlands (N = 15,642). Using genomic relationships based on common singlenucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data for more than 100 million pairs of individuals, we find that up to 30% 
of the variation in proneness to aesthetic (visual art and poetry) and music chills can be explained by familial 
relatedness effects, one-fourth of which is attributed to SNP variation. Furthermore, we reveal a moderate 
genetic correlation of .55 between aesthetic and music chills, pointing to shared genetic variation affecting
susceptibility to strong emotional responses across different art forms. Finally, we find that a polygenic 
index capturing genetic propensities towards art (N = 234,880) is associated with susceptibilities both to 
aesthetic and music chills. Our results show that additive genetic variation, but also familial relatedness
beyond shared common SNPs, contributes to proneness to chills from artistic, poetic, and musical 
expressions. These results open up a promising path towards studying the human attitude towards art, via 
both state-of-the-art genomics and intergenerational models of transmission