Dance Like Someone is Watching

Abstract

Although dancing often takes place in social contexts such as a club or party, previous study of such music-induced movement has focused mainly on individuals. The current study explores music-induced movement in a naturalistic dyadic context, focusing on the influence of personality, using five-factor model (FFM) traits, and trait empathy on participants’ responses to their partners. Fifty-four participants were recorded using motion capture while dancing to music excerpts alone and in dyads with three different partners, using a round-robin approach. Analysis using the Social Relations Model (SRM) suggested that the unique combination of each pair caused more variation in participants’ amount of movement than did individual factors. Comparison with self-reported personality and empathy measures provided some preliminary insights into the role of individual differences in such interaction. Self-reported empathy was linked to greater differences in amount of movement in responses to different partners. When looking at males only, this effect persisted for the whole body, head, and hands. For females, there was a significant relationship between participants’ Agreeableness (an FFM trait) and their partners’ head movements, suggesting that head movement may function socially to indicate affiliation in a dance context. Although consisting of modest effect sizes resulting from multiple comparisons, these results align with current theory and suggest possible ways that social context may affect music-induced movement and provide some direction for future study of the topic.