Why do we dance? I don't mean why do we take lessons in ballroom dancing, I mean why do we dance at discos, at parties and on a rugby pitch? The answer, it seems, is because our brains are set up to recognise and interpret certain body movements in a particular way. So, we can understand body movements. This suggests that dance, or movement in general, is a form of communication.

We can communicate how we feel through body movement, such that we can express to other people when we feel happy or sad. In our lab we have found that people are capable of recognising these emotions in dance with the smalest amount of information and we have found that men and women need different amounts of information to recognise different emotions? Who do you think is better at recognising when someone is moving in a sad way, when there is a tiny amount of visual information with which to make the judgement?   

It isn't only our emotions which we express through body movement. We also express our genetic and hormonal states through the way we dance. This is fascinating because it suggests that we use dance as a subconscious advertising campaign to tell the world whether we are fertile, strong and even if we are in a relationship.

In this lecture we discus the psychobiology and psychogenetics of dance.