Some of us get the chills when hearing Handel’s exultant “Messiah” this time of year. For others, it’s the simple, yet joyful opening strains of Vince Guaraldi’s music at the start of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Or it might be Bing Crosby’s poignant “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” that triggers goose bumps. (Or for the sillier of us, his whimsical “Mele Kalikimaka” might just do it.)

Well, it turns out that getting chills upon hearing music is an actual thing, you know, like scientists study. And a new report in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science says that who gets music-induced chills and who doesn’t might depend on personality.

Musical chills, write the authors, from the University of North Carolina, are “sometimes known as aesthetic chills, thrills, shivers, frisson, and even skin orgasms [who knew?] … and involve a seconds-long feeling of goose bumps, tingling, and shivers, usually on the scalp, the back of the neck, and the spine, but occasionally across most of the body.”

The scientific explanation for chills is that the emotions evoked by beautiful or meaningful music stimulate the part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which controls primal drives such as hunger, sex and rage and also involuntary responses like blushing and goosebumps. When the song soars, your body can't help but shiver.

Some people report lots of skin orgasms and some people say they never get them, but the personality trait “openness to experience” seems like a good predictor. (By "open to experience" the researchers seem to mean those people who enjoy art, good movies, aesthetic stuff.)

That’s what the North Carolina researchers wanted to test. So they took 196 people and assessed their music preferences; how often they experienced chills, goose bumps, hair standing on end and the like; their engagement with music (such as whether they played an instrument); and their personality types. The only personality trait with a significant impact on music-induced chills was indeed “openness.”

Genre, the style of music people listened to, didn’t seem to matter, though a deeper engagement with music in general did. So “Messiah,” Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” and your child’s rendition of “Oh Christmas Tree” might all give chills (though your kid’s singing might just be scary) if you’re the open type.

In 2007, scientists from the University of California San Diego studied whether or not getting chills from music enhanced altruism by measuring whether or not those who got them were more willing to donate blood. It turned out that the skin orgasm getters may be open, but chills didn’t make them any more giving, which might mean those guys ringing those damn bells ought to give it a rest already. Since music doesn't make us any more generous why not play something good? Try some Vince Guaraldi instead.

What music gives you chills? Tell us in the comments.

Find The Body Odd on Twitter and on Facebook.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

While boys are being boys, could they be screwing up the economy?

Economists at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business looked at hundreds of real mergers and acquisitions and found that younger male CEOs are more likely to make bids to acquire companies, and also withdraw those bids if they’re rejected. It’s no coincidence, the study authors write in the journal Management Science, that those younger CEOs typically have more testosterone than older ones.

Like two rams bashing heads, “high testosterone levels make men more likely to undertake dominance-seeking behaviors,” explains Terry Burnham, a Harvard University economist who studies behavior. And that can wreck shareholder value.

We’ve all heard about male CEOs who seem to care more about strutting their big shotness than they care about, oh, investors or the economy. John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, for instance, was doling out $20 billion in bonuses and buying himself a $35,000 toilet for his office while the bank was fueling the mortgage crisis. Take a look at the guy’s Superman jawline – he’s clearly got some testosterone swirling around.

Burnham proved a link to testosterone in 2007 when he measured levels in males who played the “ultimatum game.” In the game, a “proposer” gets, say, $20. He must offer some of that to a responder. If the responder accepts, they both keep the agreed amounts. If the responder rejects, both get nothing. Rational economics says the responder would accept any ultimatum amount because, after all, he still comes out ahead. But often, when proposers offer low amounts, responders reject out of spite and Burnham showed that far more men with high testosterone levels reject low-ball ultimatums, turning both into losers.

“When your young male CEO is making an acquisition bid, you wonder whether there is economic justification such as shareholder value,” Sauder professor Kai Li said, “or sheer hormone effects at work.” His suggested check on runaway testosterone? “Risk management run by older guys, or females.”

Find The Body Odd on Twitter and on Facebook.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

Are older women sexually adventurous because they, perhaps unconsciously, are desperate for a baby?

In a study released this week, a team of University of Texas graduate students led by Judith Easton wanted to know what happened to sexual feelings and action after peak fertility, but while women are still fertile. What would evolution have programmed women to do?

Well, if you follow the study’s conclusions, evolution has programmed women to act a lot like "The Real Housewives" of Orange County/New York/D.C.: horny and willing because they want to take that waning fertility for a workout.

The team based that conclusion on an online survey of 827 women. They divided those women into three groups of “high fertility” (18-26), “low fertility” (27-45) and “menopausal” (46 and older).

“We found that women in the 27-45 age group were much more willing to have sex after knowing somebody one evening, one week and one month, than younger women,” Easton told me.

This group was also more likely to have frequent and more intense sexual fantasies, and a more active sex life overall.

Interestingly, it didn’t matter if women in the low fertility group already had children or not. “It was strictly age-based,” Easton said. “That was pretty surprising.”

Easton and her colleagues found that the older women got, the more sexually willing they were until they hit menopause, at which point it started heading south.

Hmm. As msnbc.com's sex columnist, this made me skeptical. Was this about evolution, or experience? The study did not ask about sexual experience. Isn’t it possible that with more experience, women demystify sex, are more confident, and become more willing to have it on flimsier pretexts (like, say, because it’s fun), not to unconsciously take their fertility out for a jog? Easton agreed that was a potential confounding notion.

But, she pointed out, the menopausal women had fewer sexual fantasies and were less willing to bed a near-stranger so it’s not just experience. Yes, I countered, but as any man who has lived with a menopausal woman can tell you, all sorts of behavior changes, not just sexuality, thanks to our friends the hormones. The group did not test for hormone levels.

Another possibility, Easton agreed, is that our culture has finally decided that it’s O.K. – and some might say there’s even pressure -- for older women to be hot, act hot, feel hot. But whether it’s fertility, or culture or experience, Easton said, the study “sort of does support the idea of the cougar.”

Are women more confident? Experienced? Want a baby? Why do you think women are more sexually willing as they get older? Tell us in the comments.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

Are you that guy who circulates at a party, then suggests a spontaneous road trip to Vegas where you proceed to chat up every woman around the pool? Well, if one of those women happens to be a little neurotic, you, my gregarious friend, may have hit the baby-making daily double.

In a study released this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists who studied a population in Senegal found that extroverted men and neurotic -- needy, anxious, depressed -- women made more babies.

Research in this field is still sketchy, but those results sort of gibe with the findings of studies conducted in modern industrial societies. I say “sort of” because there are two important differences. First, the people in Senegal practice polygamy, and second, they don’t generally use contraception. But just like this one, the work done in modern societies shows that extroverted men are richer, and we all know how much more sex you can have if you’re, oh, a rich golfer. In Senegal, you can have more wives, too.

As Professor Virpi Lummaa of the U.K.’s Sheffield University, one of the study authors, explained to me, the findings suggest “that the link between extroversion and number of children in men is driven by the effects of extroversion on the probability of belonging to the high social class.” Since other studies in “low fertility” countries like the U.S. and Europe, where birth control is common, confirm the link, she believes these “effects might be universal across different societies.”

As for the women, she said, previous research showed that neurotic women in places like the U.S. and Europe have what amounts to daddy issues (Lummaa called it “attachment anxiety”) and so are highly motivated to have sex. Lots of sex means more babies, if you aren’t using birth control. Another possibility, Lummaa told me, is that in a polygamous society, neurotic women want to “outcompete their co-wives” in the baby-making race.

The neurotic women do pay a price: children of highly neurotic women were more likely to be undernourished.

Isn’t it possible, though, that having all those kids could make any woman neurotic? Maybe, but, the paper argued, “the fact that neuroticism does not increase with age, whereas the number of children does, also suggests that, in this population, neuroticism is more likely to be responsible for, rather than a consequence of, differential reproduction.”

Have you seen this phenomenon in your own life? Tell us in the comments.

To read more Body Odd posts, click here. You can also follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/bodyodd.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

You know how, when you’re sleeping, and you get that sexy feeling, you wake up and nudge the other person in your bed for a wee-hour encounter?

Well, what if you weren’t actually awake?

A study released today at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas, found that 7.6 percent of patients seeking help at a sleep clinic “reported that they had initiated or engaged in sexual activity with a bed partner while asleep.”

That may seem impossible -- how can you have sex when you’re asleep? But so-called “sexsomnia,” one of many parasomnias -- like sleep walking, say, or reciting your old college dissertation -- is real.

“Sexsomnia” was coined by some clever Canadian experts in 2003, but as detailed by psychiatrist Joel Dimsdale in an essay for the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, Shakespeare described it in “Othello.”

Modern day studies have documented people masturbating, groaning and dirty talking while sound asleep.

While 7.6 percent may seem high, remember that these were people who were already going to a sleep clinic. The number among the rest of us is almost certainly smaller and most people who experience it likely have something else going on, especially sleep apnea. In the new study, which included a survey of 428 men and 404 women, people who reported sexsomnia were also about twice as likely to be using illicit drugs.

The main issue, explained Dr. Alex Dimitriu, a fellow at the Stanford Sleep Medicine Clinic in Redwood City, Calif., is unstable, disturbed sleep. “Normally in a dream state your body is paralyzed,” he said. “That prevents us from acting out, say, the fight scene.” But, in some people, this protective mechanism breaks down and “then there is the possibility of acting out the sexual content of an erotic dream.”

The idea might seem funny -- and in one 2007 journal report, a few bed partners of sexsomniacs said they actually liked it -- but consequences can be serious. Sexual assaults have been committed by sexsomniacs. In a recent case from the United Kingdom, a teen boy was brought up on charges of infecting a teenage girl with Chlamydia and genital warts during sex. He was acquitted because he’d been sleepwalking.

What's the weirdest thing you've ever done in your sleep? Share it in the comment field below.

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.