Felix Schoeller

Most psychedelic experiences occur outside clinical settings, yet as policy frameworks rapidly expand to accommodate nonclinical use, no systematic data exist on who seeks psychedelic support, under what circumstances, or what makes that support effective. We present the Fireside Database, a US-based dataset comprising 25,419 peer support interactions conducted by 220 trained volunteers at Fireside Project’s Psychedelic Support Line between April 2021 and February 2026. The released resource integrates structured interaction logs with volunteer-coded metadata and 2777 caller satisfaction surveys across five outcome dimensions. Psilocybin was the most commonly reported substance (59.9% of coded interactions), while cannabis produced the highest distress rate (47.2%). The nested data structure—with 50 supporters each completing ≥10 surveyed interactions—supports multilevel modeling of individual supporter effects on caller outcomes. This resource enables research in psychedelic epidemiology, evidence-based training design, and the investigation of what makes psychedelic psychological support effective.

Aesthetic chills, psychogenic shivers elicited by emotionally charged stimuli such as music, offer a neurophysiological marker bridging subjective experience and measurable physiology. Although neuroimaging has localized chills to reward and interoceptive circuits and behavioral work has linked them to prosocial outcomes, their electrophysiological signature and its relationship to psychological change remain poorly characterized, precluding comparison with phenomenologically similar states induced by other means (e.g., psychedelics). Here we recorded 64-channel electroencephalography (EEG; n = 103) during validated chill-inducing music and examined spectral and complexity-based signatures of chills, their relationships to self-transcendence, psychological insight, emotional breakthrough, and prosocial behavior, and whether augmenting peripheral chill sensations with a custom thermal prosthesis modulates neural activity, phenomenology, and behavior. Chills carried a spatially distributed signature of attenuated theta power, elevated gamma power, and convergent increases across four independent complexity measures. Chills predicted self-transcendent phenomenology in a graded fashion across binary, frequency, and intensity operationalizations, yet predicted neither prosocial behavior nor schema change; both were instead predicted by the chills-locked neural signature, with distinct complexity measures tracking distinct outcome families. Thermal augmentation left the behavioral incidence of chills unchanged; in exploratory mediation models, however, it shifted chills-specific dynamics toward criticality and away from undifferentiated entropy, linking embodied augmentation to phenomenological, affective, prosocial, and schema outcomes. Aesthetic chills may therefore constitute an at least partially neuro-mimetic analogue of the psychedelic state, sharing its elevated signal diversity and a theta attenuation concordant with recent psilocybin electrophysiology, while gamma correspondence and the absence of psychedelic-typical alpha suppression remain unresolved.

In this commentary, we argue that aesthetic chills provide empirical evidence for Singh’s subjective functionalism. These pleasurable and measurable somatic events mark dopaminergic-mediated validation when cultural artifacts resonate with cognitive architecture. Research demonstrates chills can be predicted, induced, and therapeutically deployed for depression. This transforms aesthetics from ornamental to functional, revealing how feeling drives cultural transmission while enabling interventions.

Aesthetic chills are a peak emotional response to stimuli such as music, films, or speech characterized by shivers and goosebumps and activation of dopaminergic circuits. Despite growing scientific interest in this phenomenon, repeated exposure to chills stimuli has not been studied yet, due to the absence of a validated database. This study leverages a recent gold standard in chills stimuli to investigate the impact of repeated exposure on the frequency and intensity of aesthetic chills. Participants (n = 58) were randomly exposed to 6 chill-evoking stimuli pre-validated on the population of interest, in a counterbalanced order. Our findings revealed a significant decrease in the likelihood of experiencing chills with repeated exposure, suggesting habituation to chills itself or potential fatigue in response to aesthetic stimuli. However, we observed an increase in the intensity and duration of chills over successive exposures among those who did experience chills. The study also identified distinct demographic and psychophysiological response patterns across different participant groups, indicating variability in chill responses. These results provide insights into the dynamic nature of aesthetic experiences and their underlying neural mechanisms, with implications for understanding emotional and reward processing in psychophysiology.

Non-pharmacologically induced altered states of consciousness that promote mental health and wellbeing are a growing focus of clinical and basic research. Previous work has revealed the mood-augmenting, belief-altering, and self-transcendent effects of aesthetic-chills-inducing audiovisual stimulation. The current study investigated how a guided loving kindness meditation (LKM) combined with uplifting, chills-inducing music (henceforth: chills-augmented) affected participants' mood, self-transcendence (ST), psychological insight, and emotional breakthrough. We conducted a randomized, controlled online study (n=398) using a 2 x 2 design comparing a validated loving kindness meditation (LKM) to mindfulness-based control (MC), each with chills-augmentation (+) and without (-). As hypothesized, LKM, compared to MC, increased connectedness to others, while chills-augmentation to either stimulus (LKM+/MC+) enhanced ST, mood, emotional breakthrough, and psychological insight. Mediation analyses confirmed that the occurrence of aesthetic chills during meditation predicted the these downstream effects. They also found trait measures that independently (of main effects) contributed to distinct outcomes: absorption predicted feelings of ego-dissolution, connectedness to the world and self, and moral elevation; interoceptive awareness predicted ego-dissolution and connectedness to self; and vividness of internal imagery predicted connectedness to the world and others. This work can further our understanding of and access to non-ordinary experiences that beget salutogenic, prosocial outcomes.

Background: Body awareness (BA) and proprioception, which are essential components of the sense of agency (SA), are often altered in various mental disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, the relationship between BA, proprioception, and SA, as well as the methods to manipulate them, remain unclear. This study explored using real-time gesture sonification (GS), i.e., wearable technology transforming body movements into sounds, to enhance proprioception, BA, and thus the SA.Methods: In this within-subjects design, 17 healthy adults (mean age = 25.5 years) with varying dance expertise (novice, amateur, expert) improvised movements to match sounds with and without auditory feedback from motion sensors on wrists/ankles modulated by their gestures. BA, immersion, pleasure, and self-efficacy were measured.Results: Sonification significantly increased body awareness, reward, and immersion (all p < 0.05).Conclusion: GS can enhance BA and the SA, pleasure, and control during physical activity. This highlights potential mental health applications, such as agency-based therapies for PTSD. Manipulating bodily perception could improve symptoms and embodiment. Further research should replicate this in clinical populations and explore neurocognitive mechanisms.

Interoception has emerged as a prominent construct in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine, referring to the perception and processing of signals originating from within the body (Craig, 2002;Khalsa et al., 2018). It is thought to play a crucial role in emotional experience, self-regulation, and various clinical conditions (Barrett & Simmons, 2015;Tsakiris & Critchley, 2016). The notion of interoception as a coherent system spanning different bodily domains has gained traction, with researchers typically treating it as a unitary ability. However, mounting evidence challenges this conceptualization. In fact, large variability exists in the accuracy of different interoceptive channels (Vaitl, 1996;Ferentzi et al., 2017;Ferentzi et al., 2018: Harver et al., 1993;Whitehead and Drescher, 1980;Garfinkel et al., 2016;Garfinkel et al., 2017).While the title of this article is intentionally provocative, it serves to highlight a critical issue in the field: namely that the term "interoception" is often used in ways that belie the complexity and diversity of the phenomena it purports to describe.The evidence provided herein focuses primarily on accuracy across different modalities, though we acknowledge that interoception encompasses multiple dimensions beyond accuracy (e.g., sensibility, awareness, attention, intensity). Even within this focused scope, the data strongly suggests that treating interoception as a unitary construct is problematic. Such a monolithic view of interoception mirrors both the tension between categories (i.e., classes of entities grouped by shared features) and concepts (i.e., mental representations capturing a category's essence), reminiscent of the perception of a mosaic: from afar, interoception appears as a cohesive category or single image, but closer inspection reveals it as a complex concept comprising distinct, often unrelated subconcepts-akin to individual tiles.In fact, studies consistently find weak or absent correlations in behavioral performance across interoceptive tasks probing different modalities, such as cardiac, respiratory, and gastrointestinal perception (Ferentzi et al., 2018;Garfinkel et al., 2016;Harver et al., 1993).Associations between interoceptive indices and affective and clinical variables also vary across domains (Baranauskas et al., 2017;Paulus & Stein, 2010). In the next sections, we review evidence for the dissociability of interoceptive abilities across modalities. We focus on the more extensively studied perceptions: cardiac, respiratory, and thermal signalsfoot_0 . Our central thesis is that progress or training in one interoceptive domain does not necessarily translate to others, contrary to the notion of a unitary interoceptive ability. This dissociability is akin to athleticism in sports: while proficiency in tennis might transfer to pickleball due to similar demands, there's minimal skill transfer between disparate sports like golf and water polo, which require vastly different physical aptitudes. We argue that interoception, like athleticism, is best understood as a useful heuristic for organizing distinct lines of research, rather than a coherent empirical phenomenon. This perspective has important implications for the study and treatment of disorders thought to involve aberrant interoception. Deficits in one modality may not imply deficits in others, necessitating the development of a comprehensive multi-modal assessment, much like how athletic potential in one sport doesn't guarantee success across all sports. Interventions targeting specific interoceptive domains may be more effective than general interoceptive training, just as sport-specific training often yields better results than general fitness regimens. By embracing a differentiated view of interoception, we can develop more precise and valid models of its role in health and disease, acknowledging the unique demands and characteristics of each interoceptive modality.Interoceptive accuracy is typically assessed through various modality-specific tasks, each designed to measure sensitivity to different internal bodily signals. However, these tasks face several methodological challenges that can impact their validity and reliability. The Heartbeat Counting Task (HCT) is the most widely used measure of cardioceptive accuracy (and is often mischaracterized as a measure of "interoception"), but its validity has been questioned. Studies have shown that HCT performance is influenced by non-interoceptive processes, including time estimation and prior knowledge of heart rate (Desmedt et al., 2018;Desmedt et al., 2020;Ring & Brener, 1996). Intelligence has been found to mediate HCT performance through knowledge of resting heart rate (Murphy et al., 2018). Meta-analyses have revealed weak or non-significant associations between HCT performance and mental health outcomes (Desmedt et al., 2022). Respiratory and gastric perception are much less studied, however their instruments have similar issues. Respiroceptive accuracy is typically assessed with the Respiratory Resistance Sensitivity Task (RRST), where participants judge breathing difficulty under varying resistances (Nikoloa et al., 2021). RRST can be influenced by factors such as anxiety and asthma (Ritz et al., 2020), limiting its applicability in certain populations. The Water Load Test (WLT) measures gastric interoception by having participants drink water to perceived fullness (Van Dyck et al., 2016). However, this test can be affected by factors like recent food intake, hydration status, and individual differences in stomach capacity (Mejia-Rivas, et al., 2019). Thermoceptive accuracy, assessed via a classic temperature task or dynamic thermal matching task, has been shown to vary based on the amount of hair on the skin of participants (Crucianelli et al., 2021, Crucianelli et al., 2022).Given these limitations, considerable efforts have been made by researchers to develop alternative tasks to more accurately assess...

Affective empathy, the ability to share and understand others’ emotional states, is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. Recent evidence suggests that interoceptive inference, the brain’s prediction and processing of internal bodily signals, plays a key role in affective empathy. Building on the active inference framework, we propose that emotional contagion arises from shared interoceptive priors between individuals, shaped by physiological synchrony during social interaction. We hypothesize that precision-weighted interoceptive prediction errors update shared priors, enabling the dynamic alignment of affective states and flexible switching between defensive and affiliative modes of co-regulation. We discuss the putative neurobiological implementation of this model, focusing on the insula, amygdala, and brainstem nuclei involved in interoception and allostatic control. This theoretical account bridges neurobiology and phenomenology through computational modeling, generating precise hypotheses for future research on the mechanisms of emotional contagion

BackgroundEarly maladaptive schemas (EMS) significantly impact psychological functioning, yet their prevalence and influence within non-clinical populations are under-researched. This study explores distinct EMS clusters in a non-clinical adult sample and examines their associations with personality traits and emotional experiences.MethodsNinety-one adults (mean age 42.5) completed the Young Schema Questionnaire (YSQ-S3), Big Five Inventory (BFI), Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), and Dispositional Positive Emotion Scales (DPES). K-means clustering identified EMS patterns, and relationships between EMS clusters, personality traits, and affective states were analyzed using Kruskal-Wallis tests, t-tests, and Spearman’s rank correlations.ResultsThree EMS clusters—Low, Medium, and High intensity—were found. Neuroticism varied significantly across all clusters (p < .001), showing a strong positive correlation with most EMS. Entitlement/Grandiosity was uniquely uncorrelated with Neuroticism but negatively associated with Agreeableness. Within the Medium cluster, two personality types emerged, distinguished by Neuroticism and Extraversion. The High EMS cluster had significantly greater Negative Affect than the Low cluster (p = .002). Love and Pride dispositions differed across clusters (p ≤ .001), showing negative correlations with specific EMS.ConclusionsThis study identifies distinct EMS patterns in non-clinical adults, highlighting Neuroticism as a major factor in EMS intensity and Entitlement/Grandiosity as a unique schema with atypical personality links. The findings reveal a “Schema Continuum” in the general population, challenging the clinical/non-clinical divide. Interventions targeting Neuroticism and enhancing positive emotions like Love and Pride may reduce maladaptive schemas, suggesting a path for preventative mental health strategies.

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a multisensory experience most often associated with feelings of relaxation and altered consciousness, elicited by stimuli which include whispering, repetitive movements, and close personal attention. Since 2015, ASMR research has grown rapidly, spanning disciplines from neuroscience to media studies but lacking a collaborative or interdisciplinary approach. To build a cohesive and connected structure for ASMR research moving forwards, a modified Delphi study was conducted with ASMR experts, practitioners, community members, and researchers from various disciplines. Ninety-eight participants provided 451 suggestions for ASMR research priorities which were condensed into 13 key areas: (1) Definition, conceptual clarification, and measurement of ASMR; (2) Origins and development of ASMR; (3) Neurophysiology of ASMR; (4) Understanding ASMR triggers; (5) Factors affecting the likelihood of experiencing/eliciting ASMR; (6) ASMR and individual/cultural differences; (7) ASMR and the senses; (8) ASMR and social intimacy; (9) Positive and negative consequences of ASMR in the general population; (10) Therapeutic applications of ASMR in clinical contexts; (11) Effects of long-term ASMR use; (12) ASMR platforms and technology; (13) ASMR community, culture, and practice. These were voted on by 70% of the initial participant pool using best/worst scaling methods. The resulting agenda provides a clear map for ASMR research to enable new and existing researchers to orient themselves towards important questions for the field and to inspire interdisciplinary collaborations.