Ballet training changes how dancers process other people's facial emotions

Researchers at the Centre for Cognition and Neuroscience at City St George's, University of London, found that dance expertise alters how the brain perceives emotional facial expressions.

The team, which included Beatriz Calvo-Merino, Vasiliki Meletaki, and Bettina Forster, compared the brain activity of 26 professional or trainee ballet dancers from London schools against 26 people without dance experience. Using EEG equipment, the researchers monitored participants as they identified emotions and genders in images of happy, afraid, and neutral faces.

The study found that dancers showed earlier brain responses to these facial expressions compared to the non-dancing group. Specifically, dancers demonstrated distinct visual and somatosensory responses, which relates to the sense of touch and body position. While non-dancers showed emotional effects primarily during later stages of processing, dancers reacted more quickly in both the visual and bodily systems. The researchers suggest that specialized motor and artistic training shapes the embodied perception of emotions.

These findings indicate that dancers do not just process movement differently; their training also influences how they interpret the social signals of others. The team concluded that the study provides evidence of how the arts can impact social cognition by linking personal bodily experience to the perception of other people's feelings.