Evolution and functions of human dance

How music-induced emotions affect sexual attraction: evolutionary implications

More than a century ago, Darwin proposed a putative role for music in sexual attraction (i.e., sex appeal), a hypothesis that has recently gained traction in the field of music psychology. In his writings, Darwin particularly emphasized the charming aspects of music. Across a broad range of cultures, music has a profound impact on humans' feelings, thoughts and behavior. Human mate choice is determined by the interplay of several factors. A number of studies have shown that music and musicality (i.e., the ability to produce and enjoy music) exert a positive influence on the evaluation of potential sexual partners. Here, we critically review the latest empirical literature on how and why music and musicality affect sexual attraction by considering the role of music-induced emotion and arousal in listeners as well as other socio-biological mechanisms. Following a short overview of current theories about the origins of musicality, we present studies that examine the impact of music and musicality on sexual attraction in different social settings. We differentiate between emotion-based influences related to the subjective experience of music as sound and effects associated with perceived musical ability or creativity in a potential partner. By integrating studies using various behavioral methods, we link current research strands that investigate how music influences sexual attraction and suggest promising avenues for future research.

"It doesn't feel like exercise": a realist process evaluation of factors that support long-term attendance at dance classes designed for healthy ageing

Introduction

Dance can positively impact older people's health and wellbeing across cultures and socioeconomic groups, countering age-related physical, sensorimotor and cognitive decline.

Background/objectives

The RIPE (Really Is Possible for Everyone) Dance program aims to improve older people's physical, mental, cognitive and social wellbeing by integrating engaging dance sequences with evidence-based fall prevention exercises. We sought to identify what mechanisms support observed long-term participation in this program, including by people living with challenging health conditions.

Methods

Following a realist evaluation approach, we co-developed and tested program theories iteratively with participant interviewees (n = 20), dance teachers (n = 2) and via observation of a dance class. Initial data were dual-coded and emergent findings were interrogated by the research team. Findings were organised to express Program activities + Context + Mechanism = Process outcomes configurations.

Results

We identified four program theories comprising 14 mechanisms which explained long-term attendance: 1. RIPE Dance benefits my body and mind (trust in the program, belief in health benefits), 2. RIPE Dance helps me feel good about myself (self-efficacy, pride in achievement, psychological safety, defying expectations, feeling valued), 3. RIPE Dance creates camaraderie (social connection, mutual support, rapport with the teacher), and 4. RIPE Dance is uplifting (raised spirits, fun, synchrony, musical reactivity).

Conclusion

The RIPE Dance program provides effective and enjoyable 'exercise in disguise' for older people with diverse mobility profiles.

Significance/implications

This research confirms that participation in dance can contribute significantly to healthy, happy ageing. Findings detail program activities that were most strongly associated with process outcomes, offering guidance for further program development, implementation and scaling up.

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

Human musicality exhibits the necessary hallmarks for biological adaptations. Evolutionary explanations focus on recurrent adaptive problems that human musicality possibly solved in ancestral environments, such as mate selection and competition, social bonding/cohesion and social grooming, perceptual and motor skill development, conflict reduction, safe time-passing, transgenerational communication, mood regulation and synchronization, and credible signaling of coalition and territorial/predator defense. Although not mutually exclusive, these different hypotheses are still not conceptually integrated nor clearly derived from independent principles. I propose The Nocturnal Evolution of Human Musicality and Performativity Theory in which the night-time is the missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle of human musicality and performing arts. The expansion of nocturnal activities throughout human evolution, which is tied to tree-to-ground sleep transition and habitual use of fire, might help (i) explain the evolution of musicality from independent principles, (ii) explain various seemingly unrelated music features and functions, and (iii) integrate many ancestral adaptive values proposed. The expansion into the nocturnal niche posed recurrent ancestral adaptive challenges/opportunities: lack of luminosity, regrouping to cook before sleep, imminent dangerousness, low temperatures, peak tiredness, and concealment of identity. These crucial night-time features might have selected evening-oriented individuals who were prone to acoustic communication, more alert and imaginative, gregarious, risk-taking and novelty-seeking, prone to anxiety modulation, hedonistic, promiscuous, and disinhibited. Those night-time selected dispositions may have converged and enhanced protomusicality into human musicality by facilitating it to assume many survival- and reproduction-enhancing roles (social cohesion and coordination, signaling of coalitions, territorial defense, antipredatorial defense, knowledge transference, safe passage of time, children lullabies, and sexual selection) that are correspondent to the co-occurring night-time adaptive challenges/opportunities. The nocturnal dynamic may help explain musical features (sound, loudness, repetitiveness, call and response, song, elaboration/virtuosity, and duetting/chorusing). Across vertebrates, acoustic communication mostly occurs in nocturnal species. The eveningness chronotype is common among musicians and composers. Adolescents, who are the most evening-oriented humans, enjoy more music. Contemporary tribal nocturnal activities around the campfire involve eating, singing/dancing, storytelling, and rituals. I discuss the nocturnal integration of musicality's many roles and conclude that musicality is probably a multifunctional mental adaptation that evolved along with the night-time adaptive landscape.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest dancer of them all? A naturalistic lens model study on the judgment of dance performance

Success as a dancer is closely associated with positive dance judgments by perceivers. Although dancers' physical appearance (attractiveness, style) might affect dance judgments beyond dance-specific attributes (technique, expression), they have largely been unconsidered in previous studies. To contribute to a comprehensive explanation of real-life dance judgments, we applied the lens model, an approach explicitly developed to explain the emergence of social judgments by multiple attributes. Therefore, video-records of 70 solo performances were (1) rated regarding dancers' physical appearance, technique, and expression and (2) judged by 33 perceivers. Results of cross-classified mixed-effects models revealed that attributes of all domains were significantly related to dance judgements. Considered simultaneously, however, only dance-specific attributes contributed to the prediction of dance judgments. Additional moderation analyses underscored the importance of perceivers' expertise in judging dance. We discuss the lens model as suitable framework for a naturalistic approach to the study of aesthetic experiences and sports performances.

Universality, domain-specificity, and development of psychological responses to music

Humans can find music happy, sad, fearful, or spiritual. They can be soothed by it or urged to dance. Whether these psychological responses reflect cognitive adaptations that evolved expressly for responding to music is an ongoing topic of study. In this Review, we examine three features of music-related psychological responses that help to elucidate whether the underlying cognitive systems are specialized adaptations: universality, domain-specificity, and early expression. Focusing on emotional and behavioural responses, we find evidence that the relevant psychological mechanisms are universal and arise early in development. However, the existing evidence cannot establish that these mechanisms are domain-specific. To the contrary, many findings suggest that universal psychological responses to music reflect more general properties of emotion, auditory perception, and other human cognitive capacities that evolved for non-musical purposes. Cultural evolution, driven by the tinkering of musical performers, evidently crafts music to compellingly appeal to shared psychological mechanisms, resulting in both universal patterns (such as form-function associations) and culturally idiosyncratic styles.

Postural and Gestural Synchronization, Sequential Imitation, and Mirroring Predict Perceived Coupling of Dancing Dyads

Body movement is a primary nonverbal communication channel in humans. Coordinated social behaviors, such as dancing together, encourage multifarious rhythmic and interpersonally coupled movements from which observers can extract socially and contextually relevant information. The investigation of relations between visual social perception and kinematic motor coupling is important for social cognition. Perceived coupling of dyads spontaneously dancing to pop music has been shown to be highly driven by the degree of frontal orientation between dancers. The perceptual salience of other aspects, including postural congruence, movement frequencies, time-delayed relations, and horizontal mirroring remains, however, uncertain. In a motion capture study, 90 participant dyads moved freely to 16 musical excerpts from eight musical genres, while their movements were recorded using optical motion capture. A total from 128 recordings from 8 dyads maximally facing each other were selected to generate silent 8-s animations. Three kinematic features describing simultaneous and sequential full body coupling were extracted from the dyads. In an online experiment, the animations were presented to 432 observers, who were asked to rate perceived similarity and interaction between dancers. We found dyadic kinematic coupling estimates to be higher than those obtained from surrogate estimates, providing evidence for a social dimension of entrainment in dance. Further, we observed links between perceived similarity and coupling of both slower simultaneous horizontal gestures and posture bounding volumes. Perceived interaction, on the other hand, was more related to coupling of faster simultaneous gestures and to sequential coupling. Also, dyads who were perceived as more coupled tended to mirror their pair's movements.

“The two voices,” or more? Music and gender from myth and conquests to the neurosciences

Music is a unique phenomenon, constantly eliciting interest from a variety of viewpoints, several of which intersect the universal trait of musicality with sex/gender studies and the neurosciences. Its unparalleled power and physical, social, aesthetic, as well as cognitive, emotional and clinical ramifications make it a specially promising terrain for studies and reflections on sex and gender differences and their impact. This overview wishes to enhance awareness of such issues, also fostering an interdisciplinary exchange between the natural sciences, the humanities, and the arts. Over the centuries, different associations of music with the feminine gender have contributed to a pendulum between progressive recognition and stereotypical setbacks requiring to be overcome. Against this backdrop, music-related neurophysiological and psychological studies on sex and gender specificities are reviewed in their multiple approaches and results, exposing or questioning differences in structural, auditory, hormonal, cognitive, and behavioral areas, also in relation to abilities, treatment, and pedagogy. Thus, the bridging potential of music as universal yet diverse language, art, and practice, recommends its gender-aware integration into education, protective endeavors, and therapeutic interventions, to promote equality and well-being.

Music we move to: Spotify audio features and reasons for listening

Previous literature has shown that music preferences (and thus preferred musical features) differ depending on the listening context and reasons for listening (RL). Yet, to our knowledge no research has investigated how features of music that people dance or move to relate to particular RL. Consequently, in two online surveys, participants (N = 173) were asked to name songs they move to (“dance music”). Additionally, participants (N = 105) from Survey 1 provided RL for their selected songs. To investigate relationships between the two, we first extracted audio features from dance music using the Spotify API and compared those features with a baseline dataset that is considered to represent music in general. Analyses revealed that, compared to the baseline, the dance music dataset had significantly higher levels of energy, danceability, valence, and loudness, and lower speechiness, instrumentalness and acousticness. Second, to identify potential subgroups of dance music, a cluster analysis was performed on its Spotify audio features. Results of this cluster analysis suggested five subgroups of dance music with varying combinations of Spotify audio features: “fast-lyrical”, “sad-instrumental”, “soft-acoustic”, “sad-energy”, and “happy-energy”. Third, a factor analysis revealed three main RL categories: “achieving self-awareness”, “regulation of arousal and mood”, and “expression of social relatedness”. Finally, we identified variations in people’s RL ratings for each subgroup of dance music. This suggests that certain characteristics of dance music are more suitable for listeners’ particular RL, which shape their music preferences. Importantly, the highest-rated RL items for dance music belonged to the “regulation of mood and arousal” category. This might be interpreted as the main function of dance music. We hope that future research will elaborate on connections between musical qualities of dance music and particular music listening functions.

Darwin’s sexual selection hypothesis revisited: Musicality increases sexual attraction in both sexes

A number of theories about the origins of musicality have incorporated biological and social perspectives. Darwin argued that musicality evolved by sexual selection, functioning as a courtship display in reproductive partner choice. Darwin did not regard musicality as a sexually dimorphic trait, paralleling evidence that both sexes produce and enjoy music. A novel research strand examines the effect of musicality on sexual attraction by acknowledging the importance of facial attractiveness. We previously demonstrated that music varying in emotional content increases the perceived attractiveness and dating desirability of opposite-sex faces only in females, compared to a silent control condition. Here, we built upon this approach by presenting the person depicted (target) as the performer of the music (prime), thus establishing a direct link. We hypothesized that musical priming would increase sexual attraction, with high-arousing music inducing the largest effect. Musical primes (25 s, piano solo music) varied in arousal and pleasantness, and targets were photos of other-sex faces of average attractiveness and with neutral expressions (2 s). Participants were 35 females and 23 males (heterosexual psychology students, single, and no hormonal contraception use) matched for musical background, mood, and liking for the music used in the experiment. After musical priming, females’ ratings of attractiveness and dating desirability increased significantly. In males, only dating desirability was significantly increased by musical priming. No specific effects of music-induced pleasantness and arousal were observed. Our results, together with other recent empirical evidence, corroborate the sexual selection hypothesis for the evolution of human musicality.

The use of deep learning technology in dance movement generation

The dance generated by the traditional music action matching and statistical mapping models is less consistent with the music itself. Moreover, new dance movements cannot be generated. A dance movement generation algorithm based on deep learning is designed to extract the mapping between sound and motion features to solve these problems. First, the sound and motion features are extracted from music and dance videos, and then, the model is built. In addition, a generator module, a discriminator module, and a self-encoder module are added to make the dance movement smoother and consistent with the music. The Pix2PixHD model is used to transform the dance pose sequence into a real version of the dance. Finally, the experiment takes the dance video on the network as the training data and trained 5,000 times. About 80% of the dance data are used as the training set and 20% as the test set. The experimental results show that Train, Valid, and Test values based on the Generator+Discriminator+Autoencoder model are 15.36, 17.19, and 19.12, respectively. The similarity between the generated dance sequence and the real dance sequence is 0.063, which shows that the proposed model can generate a dance more in line with the music. Moreover, the generated dance posture is closer to the real dance posture. The discussion has certain reference value for intelligent dance teaching, game field, cross-modal generation, and exploring the relationship between audio-visual information.

Decoding Individual differences and musical preference via music-induced movement

Movement is a universal response to music, with dance often taking place in social settings. Although previous work has suggested that socially relevant information, such as personality and gender, are encoded in dance movement, the generalizability of previous work is limited. The current study aims to decode dancers’ gender, personality traits, and music preference from music-induced movements. We propose a method that predicts such individual difference from free dance movements, and demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method by using two data sets collected using different musical stimuli. In addition, we introduce a novel measure to explore the relative importance of different joints in predicting individual differences. Results demonstrated near perfect classification of gender, and notably high prediction of personality and music preferences. Furthermore, learned models demonstrated generalizability across datasets highlighting the importance of certain joints in intrinsic movement patterns specific to individual differences. Results further support theories of embodied music cognition and the role of bodily movement in musical experiences by demonstrating the influence of gender, personality, and music preferences on embodied responses to heard music.

'I Get High With a Little Help From My Friends' - How Raves Can Invoke Identity Fusion and Lasting Co-operation via Transformative Experiences

Psychoactive drugs have been central to many human group rituals throughout modern human evolution. Despite such experiences often being inherently social, bonding and associated prosocial behaviors have rarely been empirically tested as an outcome. Here we investigate a novel measure of the mechanisms that generate altered states of consciousness during group rituals, the 4Ds: dance, drums, sleep deprivation, and drugs. We conducted a retrospective online survey examining experiences at a highly ritualized cultural phenomenon where drug use is relatively uninhibited- raves and illegal free parties. Engaging in the 4Ds at raves or free parties was associated with personal transformation for those who experienced the event as awe-inspiring, especially for people with open personalities (n = 481). Without awe, or a ritual context, indulging in the 4Ds was associated with a lack of personal growth, or anomie. A complex SEM revealed that personal transformation following awe-inspiring raves was associated with bonding to other ravers and prosocial behavior toward this group at a cost to self in a simple economic game. Bonding to humanity was not associated with these events. The findings suggest that employing the 4Ds in a ritualized environment - particularly dancing and drug use - can help build meaningful social bonds with associated positive behavioral outcomes.

Dance Is More Than Meets the Eye-How Can Dance Performance Be Made Accessible for a Non-sighted Audience?

Dance is regarded as visual art form by common arts and science perspectives. Definitions of dance as means of communication agree that its message is conveyed by the dancer/choreographer via the human body for the observer, leaving no doubt that dance is performed to be watched. Brain activation elicited by the visual perception of dance has also become a topic of interest in cognitive neuroscience, with regards to action observation in the context of learning, expertise and aesthetics. The view that the aesthetic experience of dance is primarily a visual one is still shared by many artists and cultural institutions, yet there is growing interest in making dance performances accessible for individuals with visual impairment / blindness. Means of supporting the non-visual experience of dance include verbal (audio description), auditive (choreographed body sounds, movement sonification), and haptic (touch tour) techniques, applied for different purposes by artists and researchers, with three main objectives: to strengthen the cultural participation of a non-sighted audience in the cultural and aesthetic experience of dance; to expand the scope of dance as an artistic research laboratory toward novel ways of perceiving what dance can convey; and to inspire new lines of (neuro-cognitive) research beyond watching dance. Reviewing literature from different disciplines and drawing on the personal experience of an inclusive performance of Simon Mayer's "Sons of Sissy," we argue that a non-exclusively visual approach can be enriching and promising for all three perspectives and conclude by proposing hypotheses for multidisciplinary lines of research.