Monday, September 12, 2016

Ballet, Dancing Affects Emotional Sensitivity, Study Suggests

According to a recent study, dancers are proven to be more empathetic and emotionally sensitive compared to the rest of us. 

According to the research published recently in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, short video clips were presented to two sets of people: a group of professional ballet dancers, and a group of subjects with no dance experience. The video clips were silent, black and white, just a few seconds long, and the faces of the dancers were blurred, which made the facial expressions unrecognizable. With no other factors to base on other than the shapes of the moving bodies, the two sets of control group were asked to rate their emotional response base on what they saw on the short footage, whether they find them to be happy or sad.

ballet dance

The emotional response of the control groups were measured by the electrodes worn on their fingertips, which demonstrated that the ballet dancers had a much stronger emotional reactions on the footage compared to the other control group.

“The very cool thing about this study is that the dancers not only recognized the emotions better, but their bodies would also response more sensitively to the displayed emotional movements,” said Julia Christensen, the lead author of the research. “Dancers’ bodies differentiated between different emotions that were expressed in the clips, where the controls didn’t.”

Apparently, this is probably what we would expect from someone who has expertise in what they’re watching. That exactly is the point, Christensen pointed out.

What does this imply? It basically suggests that practicing the physical expressions made the dancers more sensitive to them. And this indicates one interesting thing, emotional sensitivity can be trained. In other words, there is a possibility that our bodies can be trained to be more empathetic through dance and other physical activities. 

dance ballet

Christensen believes that the study shows “why everyone should dance. Our research indicates that dance training might be a way to make you more aware of emotions.”

“You could even hypothesize that dance makes you more empathetic,” she says, “because it seems that you learn to react automatically and more sensitively to others’ expressions.” But this still needs to be studied further, she added.

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