This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: An international research team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, conducted an in-depth study of our experiences when watching dance. The results show that our acculturation to a particular culture influences how we interpret emotions in a dance and perceive beauty and meaning in movement.
This study comprises three publications in academic journals. The most recent publication was released in Perception. The team consisted of experts in psychology, dance, computer science and history from research and cultural institutions around the world.
This interdisciplinary project focused on an Iranian dance style, a cultural tradition that has received little attention in academic research so far. The researchers filmed a professional dancer who performed dance movements expressing various emotions and compiled short video clips into a movement archive. This allowed the researchers to examine how people from different cultural backgrounds and with different levels of acculturation perceive the same performances.
The researchers conducted five separate studies involving more than 500 participants from Iranian, English and Southeast Asian backgrounds. They found that people do not directly "read" emotions from body movements. Rather, their own cultural experiences shape how they interpret body movements.
For instance, individuals more familiar with Iranian culture were more likely to perceive joyful emotions in the presented Iranian dances, reflecting the festive occasions on which this dance style is typically performed. The study also showed that cultural background influences our aesthetic perception of dance. While people from different backgrounds often enjoyed the performances equally, their previous cultural experiences affected which movements they found to be particularly expressive or beautiful.
"What matters here is not a person's nationality or country of origin, but rather their familiarity and embodied experience with a cultural tradition," reports Julia F. Christensen of the MPIEA. "An important outcome is the demonstration that culture is not an 'all-or-nothing' trait.
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