Psychology of dance

Psychology of Dance

Dance and emotion

Laban Movement Analysis cateogorizes human movement based on the overall duration of time and tempo changes, how much limbs are contracted or expanded, and the tension and dynamics of movement. A study using Laban movement terms explored different emotional expressions. Observers watched 20 videos of dancers performing the same dance with anger, fear, grief, and joy. Participants rated the videos on emotion and its intensity, where they 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. A system for automated recognition was created for the videos to find cues for different emotions. Fear had less fluent motion and many contractions in toward the body. Joy had very fluent motion. Grief had frequent transitions between motion and pause phases and low fluency. The extracted cues were validated by the spectators' recognition of the different emotions in movement and the dancers' performing the emotions similarly.

A similar study with videos of movement expressing joy, anger, fear, and sadness showed that children can also successfully decode emotion. Four-, five-, and eight-year-old children and adults watched the videos and achieved recognition scores above chance level. The four-year-olds had the lowest recognition scores, while the five-year-olds achieved levels close to the eight-year-olds' and the adults' scores.

Another study also showed that observers pick up on emotion in dance even without facial expressions. Raters who had no dance experience watched videos of a dancer performing movement with seven different motives and six emotions but with a neutral face. Raters used a list of motive terms including happy, lonely, sharp, natural, solemn, dynamic, and flowing and a list of emotion terms on a scale of one to four including happiness, surprise, loneliness, fear, anger, and disgust. All of the emotions and motives were perceived in the dance videos, showing that the body offers important emotional information in the way it moves. This suggets that the body plays an important role as a medium in human communications.

Cognition is mediated by empathy in contact improvisation. Through understanding others' emotions and intentions, one can make affective motor decisions. based on embodied cognition - understanding of other people is based on capacities deeply rooted in structures of biological body but lived in a cultural context, motor cognition - how the movement can be executed, and social cognition - dancers understand others' actions and emotions, situated cognition - dancers' movements and space are continuously re-built and inseparable. Mirror neurons are the basis of all of that, allowing dancers to subconsciously identify stimuli from the other dancers to anticipate their movement so the dancer can make motor decisions, suggested to be empathetic decisions. Empathy provides temporary structuring of movements, which allows contact improvisation to be considered choreography.

Another study examined if emotions change by watching posture changes or performing them. Participants were asked to embody each posture after viewing a photograph or to observe a model embodying each posture. All participants wrote the emotion they associated with each posture. Responses did not differ based on if they observed the posture or embodied the posture, except for anger. Those embodying the posture of anger generated an anger reponse more often than when just observing it. These findings suggest that individuals moving in dance movement therapy experience feelings similar to those observing.

Expertise

Evidence suggests that dancers have more accurate position sense than non-dancers. Experts, amateurs, and novices viewed clips of basic classical ballet steps. They marked on a sheet of paper the spatial parameters of basic action concepts (BACs), which are mental representations of the break-down of each part of a movement. Basically, they were given the steps and had to indicate which direction and how far on a diagram (front, front-right, right, back-right, back, etc.) one moves one's body in that step. Results indicate that experts, amateurs, and novices had differences in their mental representations based on spatial parameters. For the Pas assemblé, amateurs and experts were able to cluster the movement into to functional phases, but in the pirouette, the experts were the only ones with adequate spatial parameters. This suggests that experts have well defined spatial parameters in their long-term memory. This also suggests that daners use mental imagery to memorize long complex phrases .

Dance as therapy for older adults

An intervention study conducted with dementia patients included dance movement therapy (DMT) to improve patients' cognitive behavior. 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. The MMSE scores improved in the DMT group at follow-up and the IADL scores improved in the DMT group at Week 9. The changes were small, but intervention-related improvements in visuospatial ability were found .

Dance and cognition

Aspects of contemporary dance draw on procedural and declarative knowledge, but dance also is expressive, involving feelings and personal experience. Beneath all of this, dancers are thinking in different modes, remembering complex movement, and responding 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 of steps. In this way, dance is similar to language, where grammar depends on procedural memory and memory of words depends on declarative memory .

Dance in schools

Because dance involves emotional and social experience, it can be helpful for children's devleopment of a strong sense of self as an emotional and social being. In a school study with preschoolers, children developed language, movement, and collaborative skills to express their ideas. Using language and movement, children created and named their own poses, learned ways of breathing to apply in different emotional siuations, mirrored others' movement, incorporated different emotions into their movement, and had time for free movement. In their shared experience, children became receptive to each other, which helped to develop their social cognition and raised their self-awareness of their bodies in that space and time .