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Psychology of dance


The psychology of dance is the set of mental states associated with dancing and watching others dance. The term names the interdisciplinary academic field that studies those who do. Areas of research include interventions to increase health for older adults, programs for stimulating children’s creativity, dance movement therapy, mate selection and emotional responses.

Continuous response data provide choreographers information about audiences' perception of their dance material. Matches and mismatches between the choreographer's intention and the audience's response were found by continuously judging the emotions expressed when audience members watched Sue Haeley's Fine Line Terrain. Key moments and intended structural changes described by the choreographer were mapped onto the continuous response data to compare the choreographer's intent and the audience's perception.

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.

Laban Movement Analysis categorizes human movement based on the duration of time and tempo changes, the contraction and expansion of limbs and the tension and dynamics of movement. In an experiment, subjects viewed 20 videos of dancers performing the same dance attempting to convey anger, fear, grief or joy. Viewers performed at an above-chance level for all but one performance of grief. The highest recognition rate was for grief, followed by anger, then joy. An automated recognition system attempted to find movement cues for different emotions. Fear was expressed with low fluency and many contractions in toward the body, joy with very fluent motion, and grief with frequent transitions between motion and pauses, reducing fluency. The extracted cues were validated by the spectators' recognition of the different emotions in movement and the dancers' performing the emotions similarly.

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 emotions, but with a neutral face. Raters employed a list of motive terms including happy, lonely, sharp, natural, solemn, dynamic and flowing. They assessed emotional intensity on a scale of one to four concerning happiness, surprise, loneliness, fear, anger and disgust. All the intended emotions and motives were perceived, showing that attempts to communicate emotion and motivation via movement can succeed.


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