Last month I reported about a research project looking for participants to view and respond to animations of synthetic ASMR triggers.
The project is now complete and Marcus Nystrand, an undergraduate student at Beckmans College of Design in Sweden, has shared the results publicly.
Some of the results surprised us both.
Helle Breth Klausen is pursuing her Ph.D. from the Department of Media and Journalism studies at Aarhus University in Denmark.
For her PhD dissertation she will be characterizing ASMR through the experiences of ASMR video viewers.
In my interview with Helle she shares why she decided to study ASMR, her primary hypothesis and methods, preliminary results she acquired with her Master’s dissertation, and her plans to share the results from this project.
Marcus Nystrand is an undergraduate student in the Visual Communications program at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm, Sweden.
For his graduation project he decided to create videos with synthetic ASMR triggers and survey if they are able to stimulate ASMR in viewers.
What are “synthetic ASMR triggers?” Marcus created computer-generated animations that have some properties of ASMR triggers (e.g., movements, sounds) but without the presence of human forms (e.g., hands) or human objects (e.g., brushes).
In short, his project is asking, “Can non-human motions, items, and sounds trigger ASMR?”
His animations are extremely high quality, very imaginative, and deeply mesmerizing. Will they trigger your ASMR?
Read on to learn a bit more about his project, then click the link to view his amazing videos and answer his short survey questions.
Christian S. is a junior high school student in New York. He is enrolled in an Advanced Placement course and has decided to do a research project about ASMR.
His research question is: “To what extent does Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) impact the levels of anxiety and depression in teens?”
He has created a survey for teenagers to investigate the relationship between watching ASMR videos and mental health.
Christian created questions about ASMR and also incorporated standardized questions from the Becks Depression Inventory and the Becks Anxiety Inventory to help him compare his results to other published results.
His survey is anonymous, specific for teenagers, and will remain open for about the next week.
Melina Delanghe is a graduate student at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Brussels, Belgium. She is pursuing her Master’s Degree in psychology in the Department of Biological & Cognitive Psychology.
For her Master’s Thesis, she decided to do an ASMR research project with Dr. Elke Van Hoof as her faculty advisor.
She investigated the ability of ASMR videos to affect the heart rates of individuals diagnosed as Highly Sensitive Persons and also in a control group.
Dr Agnieszka Janik McErlean is the lead author of the publication, “Assessing individual variation in personality and empathy traits in self-Reported Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.”
At the time of the publication she was a Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at James Cook University in Singapore. In January 2018, she will be a Senior Lecturer in the Dept of Psychology at Bath Spa University in the UK.
Dr Janik McErlean co-authored the paper with Dr Michael Banissy and the research was published March 30, 2017 in the journal Multisensory Research.
In my interview with Dr Janik McErlean she shares how she became interested in researching ASMR, the goals and methods of her study, the insights she uncovered about ASMR triggers, and her findings about the personality and empathy traits of ASMR responders.
This is the fourth peer-reviewed research study about ASMR. It was published March 30, 2017 in the journal Multisensory Research.
The research paper is titled, “Assessing individual variation in personality and empathy traits in self-Reported Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response”.
What does whisky now have in common with soda, fried chicken, chocolate, crackers, furniture, and cars?
Yes, ASMR-inspired commercials.
Scottish distillery Glenmorangie, which focuses on producing single malt scotch whiskey, has rolled out three campaign videos which incorporate ASMR triggers.
Veronica Pastore is pursuing her M.Sc. degree in Marketing Management at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy.
She chose ASMR for the topic of her Master’s Thesis, which was titled, “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) Videos: An Exploratory Analysis of Communication and Sales Potential for Companies.”
This article is an update about the data collected by the polls on this website. The data was collected from June 2014 to September 2017.
This updated summary reports poll data from about 3,000 individuals (about three times the amount since the last update).
ASMR University 