Ballroom dancing enhances emotional connection, study reveals

The journal Human Brain Mapping published a study showing that researchers have discovered a fascinating link between ballroom dance training and increased empathy. The study found that expert ballroom dancers showed higher empathic concern compared to those with no dance experience.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another — and is a concept that has long intrigued scientists. Previous research has highlighted how certain activities, like sports or arts, can enhance cognitive and emotional skills. However, dance, especially ballroom dancing, presents a unique blend of physical coordination and emotional connection that serves as relatively uncharted territory for researchers.

The goal of the present study was to explore how such a sophisticated form of interaction might influence empathic abilities. Researchers were particularly interested in whether the long-term practice of ballroom dancing, which requires closely understanding and responding to a partner’s movements and emotions, could lead to heightened empathy.

The team behind this study aimed to understand the relationship between physical activities involving close partnership and emotional intelligence. They theorized that the intricate and sustained interaction inherent in ballroom dancing might enhance the dancers’ ability to empathize with others. To test this, they recruited 43 professional ballroom dancers and 40 non-dancers from Beijing Sport University, ensuring both groups were comparable in age and sex.

They then employed a combination of high- resolution structural and functional brain imaging and self-reported measures of empathy. This approach allowed the researchers to examine not only the behavioral aspects of empathy, but also its potential neural underpinnings.

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The findings of the study were intriguing. Ballroom dancers scored higher on measures of empathic concern than the control group of non-dancers. This increased empathy was linked to the duration of their dance partnerships — but inversely related to the number of different partners they had.

On the neural level, dancers showed larger gray matter volumes in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex — a brain area associated with emotional regulation. Furthermore, there was increased connectivity between this area and the occipital gyrus — a brain area associated with object recognition. This suggests a neurological basis for the heightened empathy observed in dancers.

Still, while the study offers exciting insights, it has its limitations. The research is correlational — meaning it shows a relationship between dance training and empathy, but does not prove that one causes the other. In addition, since the study focused exclusively on ballroom dancers, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other forms of dance or physical activity. The reliance on self-reported measures for empathy might also introduce some subjective biases.

The study, “The association between ballroom dance training and empathic concern: Behavioral and brain evidence“, was authored by Xiao Wu and a team of researchers at the CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Beijing Sport University.