Psychology researchers uncover an unexpected benefit of dance training

Individuals who practice dance may be better at regulating their physical actions when they encounter positive emotional situations. A recent experiment found that dancers were faster at stopping an ongoing movement when shown happy faces, an advantage not seen in people without dance experience. The research was published in the Psychology of Sport & Exercise.

The ability to stop a physical action you have already started is known as response inhibition. This is a core executive function of the brain that people use every day. For example, you use response inhibition when you suddenly stop yourself from stepping into a crosswalk because a car runs a red light.

Psychologists generally divide this ability into two categories. Proactive inhibition involves anticipating that you might need to stop based on your surroundings. Reactive inhibition, which is the focus of this research, involves abruptly canceling a physical movement in reaction to an unexpected external signal.

In daily life, people often have to inhibit their responses while dealing with emotionally charged situations. Emotional information can easily capture human attention. Sometimes this emotional distraction helps the brain process information faster, and other times it disrupts our physical focus.

Dance offers a unique way to study how the brain handles movement and emotion at the same time. Unlike running or weightlifting, dance requires precise musical coordination and active emotional expression. Dancers must constantly adjust their physical movements while conveying feelings and responding to the emotions of their audience or partners.

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Researchers wanted to know if this combination of physical and emotional training gives dancers an edge in controlling their actions. Stuti Mehta and Rashmi Gupta of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay designed a study to test whether emotional distractions affect dancers differently than non-dancers.

The researchers recruited 83 young adults for the experiment. This group included 45 dancers and 38 people with no dance experience. The dancers had at least six months of formal training and currently practiced for at least six hours a week.

To ensure that general fitness was not the cause of any observed differences, the researchers only included participants who reported low to moderate levels of regular physical activity. The two groups were matched in terms of their overall physical exercise habits.

Participants completed two computer-based tests designed to measure reactive response inhibition. In the first test, participants watched a screen and pressed a specific keyboard key when they saw the letter X or O. They were instructed to respond as quickly as possible.

Occasionally, a green circle appeared over the letter immediately after it was shown. This green circle was a signal to stop and withhold the key press. The computer constantly adjusted the timing of this circle in 50-millisecond increments to keep the task challenging, measuring exactly how fast the participant could hit their mental brakes.

The second test followed the exact same rules, but it used emotional distractions instead of a simple green circle. When it was time to stop the key press, a photograph of a face from a standardized psychological database appeared over the letter. These faces displayed happy, angry, or neutral expressions.

The emotional faces were entirely irrelevant to the core task of identifying the letters. The researchers used them specifically to see if background emotional information would unconsciously alter the participants’ ability to stop their physical actions.

After finishing the computer tasks, participants filled out several questionnaires. These surveys measured their current moods, their typical levels of stress and depression, and their general sensitivity to rewards and punishments in life.

On the first test featuring the green circle, the dancers and non-dancers performed identically. The researchers observed no statistically significant differences in their ability to stop their responses. Without emotional information present, dance training provided no measurable advantage for physical response inhibition.

Different patterns emerged during the second test featuring the human faces. Dancers were much better at stopping their actions when the stop signal was a happy face. They made fewer errors when viewing happy expressions compared to when they saw angry or neutral expressions.

The participants without dance experience performed the exact same way across all face types. The happy faces did not give them any advantage or disadvantage in stopping their physical responses. The emotional content of the faces simply did not alter their physical control.

The questionnaire results aligned with the performance data. Dancers reported lower levels of stress and depression than the non-dancers. They also reported experiencing positive emotions more often and showed a more regulated sensitivity to rewards.

Within the dancer group, the researchers found that more years of dance experience correlated with better mental health. The longer a participant had been engaged in formal dance training, the lower their reported levels of depression and stress tended to be.

The study authors suggest that dance training might make people more sensitive to positive emotions. Dance is often associated with expressing joy and experiencing a sense of meaningful contentment. This repeated engagement with positive feelings might train the brain to process happy stimuli more efficiently.

According to psychological models of attention, positive emotions tend to broaden our mental focus. Negative emotions, on the other hand, tend to narrow our focus onto specific threats. Because dancers are highly attuned to positive expression, a happy face might require fewer mental resources for them to process, leaving more brain power available to successfully stop their physical movement.

Prior brain imaging research supports this idea. Studies have shown that dance training increases activity in areas of the brain like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. These regions are highly involved in managing emotion regulation and executive functions, which might explain the dancers’ rapid processing of the happy faces.

The study compared two different groups of people at a single point in time. This type of research cannot prove that dance training actually caused the improved response control. It is entirely possible that people who are naturally better at processing positive emotions are simply more likely to pursue dance.

The participants were also mostly young adults, which limits how these findings apply to children or older adults. The dancers practiced a variety of different dance styles. This variety makes it difficult to know if specific types of dance, like ballet or hip-hop, provide different cognitive benefits.

Future research could track individuals over time, testing their cognitive control before and after they enroll in a dance program. Researchers could also use brain imaging technology to see exactly which neural pathways activate when dancers process happy expressions during these tasks.

The study, “Happy faces, faster stops: The cognitive benefits of dance in emotional contexts,” was authored by Stuti Mehta and Rashmi Gupta.