Dance Psychology

Edited Extract from Dance Psychology

Introduction

What is Dance Psychology

Dance Psychology is the study of dance and dancers from a scientific, psychological perspective.

I set up the Dance Psychology Lab, at the University of Hertfordshire, in 2008 because I become aware of a growing body of academic literature which revealed dance and dancers through the lens of psychology. These individual pieces of research were being carried out in research labs around the world. For example, a project carried out at Rutgers University in the U.S.A. found that the way people dance, especially men, is related to their genetic make-up. What William Brown et al. (2005) found seemed remarkable to me. They showed a relationship between a person’s genetic make-up and the way that person danced. Brown et al. reported that the dancing of those people who were more physically symmetrical was rated as better quality by groups of observers than the dancing of people who were less physically symmetrical. This, together with similar research, which looked at the relationship between dancing and hormones carried out in Germany, by Bernhard Fink (see Fink et al., 2007), and in the UK by Nick Neave (see Hugill et al. 2010) made me look at the act of dancing, and our love for doing it, in a completely new way. But it wasn’t just about hormones.

Another piece of research, this time from a laboratory in Italy (see Di Blassio et al., 2009) reported that the characteristics of Caribbean dance are useful for the promotion of better health. It is clear that physical inactivity is associated with higher rates of chronic disease and premature death, but now there was a growing body of research evidence which suggested that dancing may have non-trivial positive effects on our health, and it might even help us to live a longer life. However, not everything was rosy in the garden of dance. Frank Bakker (see Bakker, 1988) carried out a study of young dancers in the Netherlands and reported that dancers had lower self-esteem than non-dancers. This leaves us with a conundrum; how is it possible for dancing to be both good for our health and at the same time bad for our self-esteem?

One other piece of research caught my eye as I was setting up the Dance Psychology Lab. This research was carried out by an international team from the USA, Canada and the UK, and was led by Steven Brown (see Brown et al. 2006). This project, which involved people dancing while in a brain scanner, found that certain areas of the brain become active when you dance, and in an article published in the academic journal Cerebral Cortex called The Neural Basis of Human Dance the authors claimed to have identified the interacting network of brain areas active during different aspects of dancing, and moving to music.

I found all of these papers fascinating. However, as a Psychologist and a scientist, these research findings left me with more questions than answers. Being a scientist can sometimes mean being sceptical, it certainly means asking difficult questions, interrogating the data and not necessarily taking the evidence presented at face value. This is essential, because it is only by approaching science from such a perspective that we can make significant advances in our knowledge and understanding of the world. This is also the case for developing a greater understanding of Dance Psychology.

Therefore, as a sceptical, scientific Dance Psychologist I was left asking, if dancing is related to our hormonal or genetic make-up, how exactly do our hormones make us move, does the way we move and dance change as our hormone levels change? How many sessions of recreational Caribbean dance are necessary to improve our health? Does everyone who dances get the same benefit, or do some people benefit more than others? What other forms of dance give us the same health benefits? Is Caribbean dance better for our health than Balinese dance? What sort of dancers (e.g. ballet, burlesque, ballroom) have lower self-esteem than people who don’t dance, and what is it about dancing that causes the reduction in a person’s self-esteem, is it something to do with dance environment, the teachers, or the characteristics of the dancers themselves? Is it really possible to dance in a brain scanner, while keeping your head and most of your body perfectly still? I set up the Dance Psychology Lab so that, with others, I could work to find answers to questions like these.

Understanding more of the detail about these Dance Psychology topics is important because if dancing is associated with certain positive or negative outcomes, we must be certain of our findings and know the limits of their application. For example, let us assume that there is some evidence that dancing makes people healthier and live longer (as there is). Now, one of the implications of this finding might be that dance sessions could be offered to everyone, paid for by the state, to enhance the health of the nation. Of course, before any government decided to pay for such a scheme it would need to have strong, compelling evidence about the relationship between dance and health; as they have, for example, about the relationship between medicines and health.

I am often asked what Dance Psychology is and what methods Dance Psychologists use to answer questions. Dance Psychology is the study of dance from a psychological perspective. Psychology is about how people think, feel and behave. It’s a broad subject and in the next few pages I will set out the different areas of psychology and the types of questions that psychologists ask. Psychology is a science and most academic (or university) psychologists are scientists. Dance, in its broadest sense, is about movement. It can be about moving on your own or with other people, it can be about moving in set patterns or moving in unplanned ways, it can be about moving to a beat or in silence. Dancing can mean being free or constrained. Dance can be an art form, or a sport, and some dancers are highly trained with expertise in one or more techniques of dance. For some, dance is a vocation.

Dance can be a recreational activity, a hobby or something that is done informally at parties, weddings or in the privacy of your own home. Dancers are people who dance. A prima ballerina performing the lead role in Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House is a dancer. So too is the middle-aged man dancing to ABBA in his kitchen. You may not consider yourself to be a dancer, but if you’ve ever put the radio on and danced around your bedroom, then you’re a dancer. In some sense, we are all dancers. In Chapter 1 I address the question of whether we are born to dance. We know, for instance, that babies will move rhythmically in response to rhythmic stimuli (e.g. music) and so, in at least that sense, we are all dancers; whether or not we have ever had a boogie in the bedroom or attended a dance class.

Psychology is about human behaviour. It’s about how we think, feel, form relationships, and, basically, how we function in every way; from our brain to our behaviour. When we study the psychology of people we often break it down into these different areas.

(c) Peter Lovatt. 2018. All rights reserved.