EMPATHY

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.