Hirohito M. Kondo

Tushar Das, Daigo Hozaki, Koushlendra Kumar Singh et al.

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a somatosensory phenomenon characterized by pleasant tingling sensations and cardiovascular slowing. However, ASMR research has been hindered by a dearth of standardized, open-access multimodal datasets. To address this limitation, we present REST-ASMR (Response to Environmental & Sensory Triggers), a synchronized multimodal dataset designed to capture behavioral reports and physiological dynamics during ASMR, with nature-relaxation videos as control stimuli. The dataset includes high-resolution photoplethysmography (PPG), time-aligned audiovisual stimuli, and continuous subjective annotations from 34 participants. Technical validation showed high stimulus efficacy (97% responder rate), significant stimulus-specific inter-subject agreement (p < 0.05), and a robust PPG-derived ASMR-specific cardiovascular deceleration. Additionally, a Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory model successfully predicted subjective ASMR tingle states, achieving video-level ASMR vs. Nature classification with perfect accuracy and a frame-level global mean accuracy of 75.51%, macro F1-score of 71.86%, and 100% Nature-baseline specificity, under a strict, leakage-free subject-video double-independent 4-fold cross-validation. REST-ASMR constitutes a dense temporal foundation for affective computing, multimodal research, and the development of personalized models of relaxation-related responses.

Shiori Honda, Yuri Ishikawa, Rei Konno et al.

Auditory frisson is the experience of feeling of cold or shivering related to sound in the absence of a physical cold stimulus. Multiple examples of frisson-inducing sounds have been reported, but the mechanism of auditory frisson remains elusive. Typical frisson-inducing sounds may contain a looming effect, in which a sound appears to approach the listener's peripersonal space. Previous studies on sound in peripersonal space have provided objective measurements of sound-inducing effects, but few have investigated the subjective experience of frisson-inducing sounds. Here we explored whether it is possible to produce subjective feelings of frisson by moving a noise sound (white noise, rolling beads noise, or frictional noise produced by rubbing a plastic bag) stimulus around a listener's head. Our results demonstrated that sound-induced frisson can be experienced stronger when auditory stimuli are rotated around the head (binaural moving sounds) than the one without the rotation (monaural static sounds), regardless of the source of the noise sound. Pearson's correlation analysis showed that several acoustic features of auditory stimuli, such as variance of interaural level difference (ILD), loudness, and sharpness, were correlated with the magnitude of subjective frisson. We had also observed that the subjective feelings of frisson by moving a musical sound had increased comparing with a static musical sound.