Psychology of dance
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The psychology of dance is the set of mental states associated with
Audience perception
Continuous response data provide
Surface features of dance contribute to audience arousal. Audience members continuously indicated their arousal and valence while viewing the Quantum Leap Youth Choreographic Ensemble's Landscape: time, place, and identity by continuously judging valence and emotion portrayed by the dance. Researchers compared this to choreographic notes about emotions expressed during the piece and found that arousal was related to changes in music and dancer activity.[1]
Recognizing emotion
Adults
Observers picked up emotion even without facial expressions. Raters with no dance experience watched videos of a dancer performing movement with seven different motives and six
Individuals participating in dance therapy identify feelings similar to those observing the activity. Participants attempted each posture after viewing a photograph or a model in the posture. Participants noted the emotion they associated with each posture. Responses were the same whether the subject was observing or embodying the posture, except for anger. Movers noted an anger response more often than observers.[4]
Children
Four-, five-, and eight-year-old children and adults watched videos of movement expressing joy, anger, fear and sadness and indicated which emotions they perceived in each video. All age groups achieved recognition scores above chance level. The four-year-olds had the lowest scores, while the five-year-olds achieved levels close to the eight-year-olds' and the adults' scores.[5]
Expertise
Ballet and Indian dance
Untrained, frequent spectators and novices of ballet or Indian dance watched videos of ballet, Indian dance, and non-dance soloists. Motor-
Position sense
Dancers have more accurate
Participating in dance
Dancers think in different modes, remember complex movement and respond to the other dancers. Communication between dancers occurs through direct perception of motion, recognition of structure and neural mirroring. Dancers' memory includes procedural knowledge of how to move their bodies and declarative knowledge of specific combinations. Thus, dance is similar to language, where grammar depends on procedural memory and memory of words depends on declarative memory. Dance also involves feelings and personal experience.[9]
Each contemporary dancer has a moving identity as a result of a collection of choreographic and training influences that reveals a personal narrative.[10]
One Duke University study found that dancers learn routines in different ways, whether by dancing at half speed or in their minds.[11][12]
A study has found that participating in synchronised dancing facilitates group bonding and higher pain thresholds more so than participating in unsynchronised dancing together.[13]
Emotion
Empathy
Creativity
Emotions were shown to affect creativity through arousal and valence interactions for subjects playing the video game Dance Dance Revolution. Participants were randomly assigned to three different levels of exertion, representing levels of arousal. While the participants danced, an experimenter randomly gave them either a very bad grade or a very good grade, attempting to affect the subject's mood. After dancing, the participants were tested on valence, mood, arousal, creativity and level of physical and mental energy. Lower arousal levels resulted in higher creativity scores when a negative mood was induced. With higher arousal levels, a positive mood resulted in greater creativity than a negative mood.[15]
Schools
Dance employs emotion, creativity, cultural influence and symbolism to convey meaning. Dance resembles verbal language because it has a vocabulary (dance movements) and grammar (system for combining movements).[16] Dance increases connectedness among students and between students and teachers in the classroom.[17] In schools students can enhance bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, reorganize neural pathways to improve learning, and express knowledge through dance.[16]
Dance helps students to develop a sense of self as an emotional and social being. In preschool, children developed language, movement and collaborative skills to express their ideas. They created and named poses, learned ways of breathing to apply in different emotional situations, mirrored others' movements, incorporated emotions into their movement and participated in free movement. Children enhanced their social cognition and raised their awareness of their bodies.[18]
Therapy
Dance movement therapy
Dementia patients who participated in a dance movement therapy (DMT) intervention showed improved cognition compared to a control group. The intervention group participated in nine thirty- to forty-minute sessions of dance movement therapy. The control and intervention groups completed the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), the Word List savings score, the instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) and the Clock Drawing Test a week before, immediately before, at week five, at week nine and four weeks after the intervention. MMSE scores improved in the DMT group at follow-up and IADL scores improved in the DMT group at week 9. The changes were small, but intervention-related improvements in visuospatial ability were found.[19]
Aerobic dance
An aerobic dance program improved older adults' executive function. Participants were assigned to a freestyle workout, which involved patterns of movement, or a combination style workout, in which they learned a long choreographic routine. Their cognitive function was tested immediately before and after the forty-minute dance class with a task-switching reaction time test. Performance improved in the combination group after the program, while there was no change in the freestyle group.[20]
Jazz dance
A jazz dance class study was conducted to improve older adults' balance, cognition and mood. These were measured with the MMSE, Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), and Sensory Organization Test (SOT), respectively before (time 1), at the midpoint (time 2), and after (time 3) the class. Differences in MMSE and GDS scores were not significant, but SOT scores increased from time 1 to time 2 and from time 2 to time 3.[21]
Implications about mate selection
Symmetry
Charles Darwin suggested that dance is a signal for natural selection in courtship. Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) measures quality of dancing, where higher scores indicate lower quality. Higher FA individuals are less attractive. They are more likely to engage with other FA individuals. A motion capture study of videos of Jamaican dancers, altered to make the dancers unrecognizable used FA ratings to categorize the dancers. Male and female subjects assessed dancing ability and identified the dancer's sex. Symmetrical dancers were rated as significantly better than others, but female symmetry accounted for less than it did in males. Female evaluators more strongly preferred symmetrical male dancers than male evaluators, while there was no gender difference in ratings of female dancers. Lower FA male evaluators were less likely to prefer dances performed by symmetrical females.
Below Citation has been retracted since 2013. [22]
Risk-taking
Mate preference occurs when women perceive risk-taking in men from motion cues in dance. Non-professional heterosexual male dancers completed the Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS-V) assessing their attitudes towards risky activities, thrill-seeking, partying and sexual activities. Women viewed videos of them dancing alone in a room and rated them on perceived risk-taking and perceived attractiveness. Mean attractiveness ratings of the dancers correlated positively with their mean risk-taking and sensation seeking ratings.[clarification needed][23]
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- ^ "5 Interesting Psychological Studies That Involve Dancing". DanceHub. 27 October 2014. Retrieved 9 November 2014.
- ^ Shulklapper, Kali (31 October 2013). "Research investigates the science behind dance". The Chronicle. Archived from the original on 10 November 2014. Retrieved 9 November 2014.
- ^ "Let's dance: Synchronised movement helps us tolerate pain and foster friendship".
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