Good dancing may be sign of male health
Scientists say they’ve carried out the first rigorous analysis of dance moves that make men attractive to women.
The researchers say that movements associated with good dancing may be indicative of good health and reproductive potential.“When you go out to clubs people have an intuitive understanding of what makes a good and bad dancer,” said co-author Dr Nick Neave, an evolutionary psychologist at Northumbria University, UK.
“What we’ve done for the very first time is put those things together with a biometric analysis so we can actually calculate very precisely the kinds of movements people focus on and associate them with women’s ratings of male dancers.”
Dr Neave asked young men who were not professional dancers, to dance in a laboratory to a very basic drum rhythm and their movements with 12 cameras.
There are two videos at the link - recommended!
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“We thought that people’s arms and legs would be really important. The kind of expressive gestures the hands [make], for example. But in fact this was not the case,” he said.
“We found that (women paid more attention to) the core body region: the torso, the neck, the head. It was not just the speed of the movements, it was also the variability of the movement. […]
I could have told them that. In my experience women appreciate men who know how to move their torso. This is very clear in various forms of latin dancing (say salsa or merengue) where the better dancers clearly move their torso to the music - and it gets noticed.
Movements that went down terribly were twitchy and repetitive - so called “Dad dancing”.
Dr Neave’s aim was to establish whether young men exhibited the same courtship movement rituals in night clubs as animals do in the wild. [Ans - of course they do!] In the case of animals, these movements give information about their health, age, their reproductive potential and their hormone status.
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“In animals, the male has to be in good physical quality to carry out these movements. We think the same is happening in humans and certainly the guys that can put these movements together are going to be young and fit and healthy.”
Dr Neave also took blood samples from the volunteers. Early indications from biochemical tests suggest that the men who were better dancers were also more healthy.
In my experience, dancers as a whole are healthier (physically and mentally) than those who don’t dance.