Dancing and empathy – does dance training make you ‘feel’ more?

A paper published last month in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that dancers, with their finely honed control over their bodies through which they can express emotion, are more sensitive than most in perceiving such emotion in others. Or, as The Washington Post summed it up: dancers are more emotionally sensitive than the rest of us.

The study’s abstract puts it in a somewhat more technical way:

Results showed that motor expertise in affective body movement specifically modulated both behavioural and physiological sensitivity to others’ affective body movement.

One of the researchers was Julia F Christensen, a research fellow in the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit at City University London. She told the Post,

The very cool thing about this study is that the dancers not only recognized the emotions better, but their bodies would also respond more sensitively to the displayed emotional movements. Dancers’ bodies differentiated between different emotions that were expressed in the clips, where the controls didn’t.

Ninety-six short ballet videos were shown to 19 professional ballet dancers (known as the ‘experts’) and to 24 in a control group of people who had no dance experience. The participants were fitted with electrodes on their fingertips which detected the sweat response triggered by emotional reactions.

The clips were silent, just a few seconds long, and the dancers’ faces were also blurred so that no facial expressions were visible.

There was a subjective response from each participant as they rated their feelings about what they had seen – happy or sad –  and a physiological response from the recording of their galvanic skin reaction.

While both groups were able to identify what emotion was being expressed, the reaction from the dancers, both subjective and monitored, was much stronger. As the paper says,

Results showed that motor expertise in affective body movement specifically modulated both behavioural and physiological sensitivity to others’ affective body movement.

Christensen adds,

You could even hypothesize that dance makes you more empathetic, because it seems that you learn to react automatically and more sensitively to others’ expressions.

Of course, there is the chicken and the egg problem: does studying dance make you more sensitive or are you capable of becoming a professional dancer because you are naturally more sensitive?

Many studies have looked at the mirroring effect in human nature. The introduction to Evidence for mirror systems in emotions published in the Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society, says,

Why do we feel tears well up when we see a loved one cry? Why do we wince when we see other people hurt themselves? …Humans have an astonishing capacity to intuitively grasp the mental states of other individuals. Although people’s more subtle emotions can remain puzzling, we often have gut feelings of what is going on in other individuals.

In Christensen’s study however, it says that the dancers not only mirror the emotions conveyed but also feel them more intensely, and this is intriguing. She says,

Is empathy a muscle that you have to train? We don’t know.

So it just could be that dance training helps us to make us better people.

Everyone should dance. Our research indicates that dance training might be a way to make you more aware of emotions.

Dance expertise modulates behavioral and psychophysiological responses to affective body movement.
Christensen, Julia F.; Gomila, Antoni; Gaigg, Sebastian B.; Sivarajah, Nithura; Calvo-Merino, Beatriz
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Vol 42(8), Aug 2016, 1139-1147.

Gramilano( Editor )

Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano’) about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.

His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia’ column for Dancing Times magazine.