A study led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, has shown that both amateur and professional dancers are less neurotic than people who do not dance. They are also nicer, more open and more extroverted. But the genre of the dance does matter.
“Tell me if you dance and I’ll tell you who you are!” A study led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, has shown that both amateur and professional dancers are less neurotic than people who do not dance. They are also nicer, more open and more extroverted. The results of the study have been recently published in the journal Personality and individual differences.
In collaboration with Matthias Blattmann, general director of the Gutmann dance school in Freiburg im Breisgau and Tanzloft GmbH, and Luisa Sancho-Escanero, dance director of the Pfalztheater Kaiserslautern, MPIEA researchers analyzed data from 5,435 people from Sweden and 574 people from Germany, regarding its big five personality traits: “openness”, “conscientiousness”, “extraversion”, “agreeableness” and “neuroticism”.
“What is unique about this work is that we have gathered very large samples from two different countries. These data are generally sparse and previous studies have often been based on quite small samples,” explains lead author Fredrik Ullén, director of the MPIEA. . .
In Sweden, the research team was able to draw on an existing database that included data on dancers’ creative engagement and achievements in dance. To collect data from dancers in Germany, the researchers developed an online survey that was widely shared by dance institutions.
Previous studies have shown that musicians are more agreeable and open to others than non-musicians. In the current study, this was also confirmed for the dancers. But the researchers also found an interesting difference between the two groups: compared to musicians, dancers are not more neurotic, but, on the contrary, less neurotic than people who do not dance.
“In general, both dancers and singers show a high degree of extraversion in their personality – which may be due to the fact that their means of expression when dancing and singing is their body – and this is a very socially exposed situation, more so than if expressed through an instrument, for example. However, deeper research is needed to explore this further,” says lead author Julia F. Christensen of the MPIEA.
There was also some evidence of personality differences between dancers of different styles. Swing dancers, for example, appeared to be even less neurotic than Latin and standard dancers. However, this needs to be confirmed with larger samples of dancers. In the future, the researchers hope to expand their research on dancer personality to many other cultures and dance styles.