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The psychology of dance is an interdisciplinary field that studies the cognition and perception of watching and participating in dance. Areas of research include, but are not limited to, interventions for older adults, programs for children’s creativity, dance movement therapy, mate selection, and emotion of the viewer and the performer.

=Watching dance=

Audience perception
Choreographers use audience preference to make successful art. Continuous response data provide choreographers information about audiences' perception of their dance material. Congruencies and incongruencies between the choreographer's intention and the audience's response were found when audience members watched Sue Haeley's Fine Line Terrain, continuously judging the emotion expressed by the artwork. Key moments and intended structual changes in the piece 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 activity of the dancers.

Adults
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. Laban movement terms were examined when observers rated emotion and its intensity in 20 videos of dancers performing the same dance with anger, fear, grief, and joy. 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 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 pause phases, creating low fluency. The extracted cues were validated by the spectators' recognition of the different emotions in movement and the dancers' performing the emotions similarly.

Observers pick up on emotion in dance 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 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 suggests that the body plays an important role as a medium in human communications.

Individuals moving in dance movement therapy experience feelings similar to those observing. Participants embodied each posture after viewing a photograph or observed a model embodying each posture. All participants wrote the emotion they associated with each posture. Responses did not differ based on observing or embodying the posture, except for anger. Those embodying the posture of anger generated an anger reponse more often than when just observing it.

Children
Children can successfully decode emotion. Four-, five-, and eight-year-old children and adults watched videos of movement expressing joy, anger, fear, and sadness and indicated which of the four emotions they perceived in each video. All age groups 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.

Ballet and Indian dance
Expertise in watching dance results in a motor response. With no dance training, frequent spectators and novices of ballet or Indian dance watched videos of ballet, Indian dance, and non-dance soloists. Motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) in their hands and arms were used to measure corticospinal excitability. In ballet, the arms are used frequently, while the hands are used in Indian dance. Participants had higher MEPs in their arms when watching ballet compared to Indian dance. Ballet spectators' visual experience, not motor experience, drove motor resonance.

=Participating in dance= Dancing involves cognition and perception. 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 of steps. Thus, dance is similar to language, where grammar depends on procedural memory and memory of words depends on declarative memory.

Aspects of contemporary dance draw on procedural and declarative knowledge, but dance also involves feelings and personal experience. Each contemporary dancer has a moving identity as a result of a collection of choreographic and training influences that reveals a personal narrative.

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

Creativity
Emotions affect creativity through arousal and valence interacting when dancing in the video game Dance Dance Revolution. Participants were randomly assigned to three different levels of exertion, which represented levels of arousal. While the participants danced, an experimenter graded them with a very bad grade or a very good grade to induce either a positive or negative mood. After dancing, the participants were tested on their 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.

Position sense
Dancers have more accurate position sense than non-dancers so they rely more on position sense than vision. Experts, amateurs, and novices differ in their mental representations based on spatial parameters. Experts, amateurs, and novices viewed clips of basic classical ballet steps and 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. For the Pas assemblé, amateurs and experts clustered the movement into to functional phases, but for the pirouette, only experts had adequate spatial parameters. This suggests that experts have well defined spatial parameters in their long-term memory and that dancers use mental imagery to memorize long complex phrases.

Schools
Dance provides universal nonverbal communication for learning in schools by using emotion, creativity, cultural influence, and symbolization to convey meaning. Dance resembles verbal language because it has a vocabulary (dance movements), grammar (structure for putting movement together), and meaning. Dance increases connectedness among students and between students and teachers in the classroom. Through the creative process of dance, students develop bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, reorganize neural pathways to improve learning, and express declarative and procedural knowledge.

Dance is helpful for children's development of a strong sense of self as an emotional and social being. Preschoolers developed language, movement, and collaborative skills to express their ideas in a school dance program. Children created and named their own poses, learned ways of breathing to apply in different emotional situations, mirrored others' movement, incorporated different emotions into their movement, and participated in free movement. 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.

Dance movement therapy
Dementia patients who participated in a dance movement therapy (DMT) intervention showed improved cognition compared to a control group without the intervention. 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.

Aerobic dance
An aerobic dance program improved older adults' executive function. Participants were assigned to a free style workout, which simply 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 free style group.

Jazz dance
A jazz dance class study was conducted to improve older adults' balance, cognition, and mood. Cognition, mood, and balance scores were taken 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 jazz dance class. There were no significant differences in MMSE and GDS scores over time, but SOT scores increased from time 1 to time 2 and from time 2 to time 3, indicating older adults' balance improved with the jazz dance class. This is beneficial for older adults because falls are a leading cause of mortality in them.

=Implications about mate selection=

Symmetry
Charles Darwin suggested that dance is a signal for natural selection in courtship. Fluctuating asymmetry (FA), indicates quality of dancing, where higher FA individuals are less attractive, so they shift their preferences downward toward individuals more likely to mate with them. Motion-capture technology is used on videos of Jamaican dancers, making them not recognizable as individuals, to test this. Experimenters chose which videos to use based on their FA ratings. Male and female participants rated dancers on dancing ability and identified the dancer's sex. Symmetrical males were rated as significantly better dancers than asymmetrical males and symmetrical females were significantly better dancers than asymmetrical females, but female symmetry accounted for less of the females' dance ability than it accounted for in males. Female evaluators more strongly preferred symmetrical male dancers than male evaluators, while there was no sex difference in ratings of female dancers. Lower FA male evaluators were less likely to prefer dances performed by symmetrical females, indicating that individuals shift preferences to fit someone who will accept them.

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 desire to seek thrill, risky activities, partying, and sexual partners. Women viewed videos of the male dancers dancing in a room alone and rated each dancer on perceived risk-taking and perceived attractiveness. Mean attractiveness ratings of the dancers correlated positively with their mean risk-taking and sensation seeking ratings. Women judged risk-taking men's dancing more attractive.

=References=