Water Cooler: What our dance moves say about us/social cues in dancing

Dance is a universal human expression. Even those of us who feel like we can’t dance often will when coaxed by a bit of inebriation and dim lighting, and it turns out that how we groove says a lot about us.

Just like facial expression and body language, dance is among the various psychological signals that we use for social cognition, which enables us to be part of social groups. We are able to observe and interpret these signals, such as when a baby observes the facial expression of its parents when deciding whether or not to approach an object. These processes generally happen unconsciously and automatically.

Even babies show an affinity for dancing, and children around the ages of 4 and 5 have been shown to be able to accurately interpret the emotions exhibited by someone dancing. This ability becomes more nuanced with age.

A 1996 study called “Perception of Emotion from Dynamic Point-Light Displays Represented in Dance,” had participants study two dancers who used dance to portray the emotions of fear, anger, grief, joy, surprise and disgust. The dancers had 13 small points of light attached to their bodies so when they danced, the participants could only observe the movement of those points, not the full bodies of the dancers. The participants were still able to correctly interpret the portrayed emotions about 88% of the time.

The social information relayed through dance doesn’t just end at reading emotions. A 2011 study titled, “Women’s perception of men’s sensation seeking propensity from their dance movements,” asked 60 women to judge 50 videos of men dancing and rate how attractive they were and their propensity for risk-taking.

Risk-taking behavior is thought to be an expression of the personality trait of sensation seeking, which is generally associated with vigor, good health and high amounts of testosterone, which have long been biological signals for finding a good mate, or in modern terms, things that are generally considered attractive.

Their ratings were compared to the dancers’ scores on the “Sensation Seeking Scale Form V” test. High scores of sensation seeking in the men had a significant and positive correlation with high ratings from the women. This led the researchers to conclude that the dancers’ movements were portraying social cues that the observers were sensitive to and could accurately interpret.

Your dance style can even reveal your personality. A 2009 study titled “Personality Traits Correlate With Characteristics of Music-Induced Movement,” showed a correlation between people’s dance moves and their scores on the “Big Five” personality traits test, a sliding test scale that evaluates people according to five overarching traits – openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The study was small with only 20 participants, but when researchers compared the participants’ spontaneous dance moves during a 12 bar blues sequence to their Big Five personality test results, there were strong relationships between their personality and how they moved. People with high scores of neuroticism tended to have faster, jerky movements, and those with high scores of openness to experience and agreeableness had smoother movements overall. High scores of conscientiousness and extraversion tended to correlate with higher speeds of movement.

Several studies have shown that dance experience strengthens a person’s ability to read social cues, such as the 2017 study, “Hip Hop Dance Experience Linked to Sociocognitive Ability,” which showed that dancers with more experience were more accurate when assessing the emotions of people’s faces in photos.

Dancing is already known for its multiple benefits, such as being a good source of fun and exercise, lifting moods and bettering cognitive and motor skills, but now you can bust a move to sharpen your social skills, too.