Everybody on the Dance Floor!

Dance like the world is not watching you! All of us have heard this at least once in our lives and have also danced like the world wasn’t watching us. Professional dancers move so gracefully that they can move you to tears. Other (non-professional) persons with a deep passion for dance may move you to tears of a different kind. Well, what if I (informed by research studies) told you that dance is also a mode of communication? That dance, like language, transmits information from one person to another.

Here, I would like to introduce Dr. Peter Lovatt, also known as “Doctor Dance.” Dr. Lovatt is a dance psychologist, and a professional dancer, who runs the Dance Psychology Lab at the University of Hertfordshire. A Dance Psychology Lab! Isn’t that interesting? So what does a dance psychologist do? We have heard that dance soothes and that it can be used as therapy, but what could a dance psychologist possibly do? Well, as is written on Dr. Lovatt’s website, “Dance psychologists are interested in understanding how people communicate through dance and body movements.” They study emotions associated with each body movement, and also how stories are understood through dance.

Now let me take you through some of the interesting findings of Doctor Dance, which will help you understand why dance is a mode of communication. Dr. Lovatt has been studying how dance affects one’s self esteem (Lovatt, 2011), how dance is related to thinking (mainly convergent and divergent thinking; Lewis & Lovatt, 2013; Lovatt, 2013) and also how dance can affect the moods of those with Parkinson’s disease (Lewis, Annett, Davenport, Hall, & Lovatt, 2014). But his findings about dance and hormones were the most intriguing. He found that women who are in the fertile period of their cycle dance moving only their hips when compared with women not in their fertile period.

When men were asked to rate the level of attractiveness of various women dancing, they tended to rate women dancing only with their hips to be more attractive than women who danced with their whole body. To validate this further, he observed how women dance at various stages of their cycle, and found that the same woman dances differently in her fertile period and in her low fertile period. On the other hand, he also found that men who dance more vigorously, are the men who have high levels of testosterone in their body. These men are also rated more attractive by women when compared to men who don’t dance vigorously. What does this tell us? That we are biologically driven to dance and that the way one dances describes biological and genetic make-up. It can be seen as a way of communicating to the opposite sex. If you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, it helped women spot men who were high on testosterone to perpetuate their genes and vice versa.

 Dance is also used as a form of therapy known as dance movement therapy. This is based on the assumption that the body, mind, and spirit are interconnected and uses dance movement for the emotional, cognitive, and physical integration of an individual.

So, these studies on dancing suggest that the way we dance maybe a form of expression of our hormonal level. We may also be able to infer that dancing comes naturally to us. So, the next time you are in a club, don’t hesitate to shake a leg!

Suggested Readings:

Mood changes following social dance sessions in people with Parkinson’s disease.

The power of dance across behavior and thinking.

Dance, Thinking and Hormones

Dance and Psychology

Sharanya  Venugopal

On Language and Its Rules: Why context matters

After having recognized the fact that a language is susceptible to the influence of environment, one can also safely claim that language is exercised within a certain context. It is inevitable that a person will use words, which would have different meanings, or rather a different shade of the same meaning, depending upon the context. For example, two people may use the word pain with a different connotation. One may mean pain caused due to a paper cut while other may be talking about the agony caused due to bullet. Here, the actual meaning of the word is understood by placing it in a certain framework.  In his much revered book, Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll (1871) quintessentially encapsulates my argument. He writes, “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,’” (Carroll, 1871).

Moreover, by standardizing language or by allowing one word to mean only one thing, one bars individuality from entering the realm of language. People would speak like monotonic robots and the flair or lilt that makes languages unique would be lost forever.          

Recent research has shown that language influences thought. A psychologist at the Stanford University, Lera Boroditsky, has conducted several experiments to determine whether language influences our thinking pattern.  In one such experiment Boroditsky and Gaby (2010) investigated how language determines the way people think about time. Her team gave two different language groups—an English-speaking group and a Kuuk Thaayorre-speaking group (belonging to Pormpuraaw, an aboriginal community in Australia)—a set of cards showing some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a crocodile growing, a banana being eaten). The participants were asked to arrange the shuffled cards in correct temporal order.  Each person was tested in two separate settings, each time facing a different cardinal direction. The English speakers arranged the cards from left to right, but the Kuuk Thaayyore-speaking people arranged the cards from east to west. When they faced north, their cards went from right to left but when they faced south, their cards went from left to right. The Kuuk Thaayore-speaking people used spatial representation to construct their representation of time. Boroditsky, Fuhrman, and McCormick (2011) also found that Mandarin speakers talk about time in a vertical context (e.g., the next month is the down month, while last month was the “up month”) and the English speakers talk about time in a horizontal spatial context (e.g., the best is ahead of us while the worst is behind us). Furthermore, when English speakers are taught to talk about time in a Mandarin manner, their cognitive performance on several tasks resembles that of Mandarin speakers (Borodistsky, 2009). We can glean that language is used differently across contexts and affects thoughts.  In his essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid”, Nicholas Carr (2008) mentions how Friedrich Nietzsche’s writing changed because he moved from pen and paper to typewriter due to his failing vision. “His terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic” (Carr, 2008, para. 11). Someone reading Nietzsche’s latter works has to take his failing vision and typewriter into account. This further proves that language is very sensitive to context.

Since language is the basic tool of communication, it becomes an intrinsic part of a person. When my father was trying to teach me Greek, he told me that in order to comprehend the value or significance of a language, one has to learn to live with that language, for, a person is born in a language, loves in that language, marries in that language and, ultimately, dies with that language. This makes language a very intimate aspect of the person and commands respect or at least acknowledgement of language.

Prachi Bhuptani

Keeping you in the dark: The psychology of self-deception

Have you ever told yourself you are better than others just to feel more confident? Or convinced yourself that you’d work harder even though you know you won’t? Most of us have lied to ourselves at some point in our lives. Most forms of psychotherapy seek to decrease self-deception so that clients are well adjusted, have valid information of themselves, and are in touch with reality. Influential psychologists such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Aaron Beck and others have emphasized the importance of realistic views about the self. So why do we keep ourselves in the dark? Research has focused on the various ill effects of self-deception. For example, the planning fallacy, which refers to our tendency to underestimate the time taken to complete a task (Buehler, Griffin, & Ross, 1994) could lead to procrastination, thereby, resulting in stress and poor quality work (Tice & Baumeister, 1997). 

Even though we know self-deception is harmful, we continue to do it. This concurs with a contrasting view that self-deception is an important defence mechanism that protects us from threatening information or circumstances (Trivers, 2010). Researchers have found that people who have positive illusions about themselves are less likely to be depressed and have positive self-esteem (Taylor & Brown, 1988). Evolutionary psychologists propose that humans are good at deceiving themselves and that self-deception is adaptive. 

Self-deception has been regarded as an unconscious process because, it would be almost impossible for the self to be a deceiver if it consciously knows that it is being deceived (von Hippel & Trivers, 2011). Trivers (2010, p. 373) has defined self-deception as “hiding true information from the conscious mind in the unconscious.” If self-deception involves hiding facts, then how do researchers study this phenomenon? Further, how is self-deception detected? Some indicators include nervousness, and control, rather over-control, of the face, and body muscles (DePaulo et al. 2003). Self-deception can also be checked using questionnaires, like the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR) developed by Paulhus (1988). Here, items represent exaggerated positive characteristics about the self. For instance, one such item is “I never lie.” The higher individuals rate the item as personally relevant, the more likely they are to be representing a favourable image of themselves to others. After all, although everyone lies, lying itself is negative.

Even though normal individuals engage in self-deception, it has also been associated with psychopathology and neuropsychological disorders. One such neurological disorder, known as Anosognosia (Babinski, 1914) is a self-deceptive disorder where patients have physical injuries but deny them (Bayne & Fernandez, 2010). Ramachandran (2009) described an anosognistic patient who denied that her left arm was paralyzed and believed that her lifeless arm belonged to her father who was “hiding under the table.”

I remember telling myself that I would stop eating junk food. I wrote it in my diary and told my closest friends so that I would be committed to my resolution. Unfortunately, I cannot say that my diet has been very healthy. I remember how I always had some self-validated reason for eating junk, or would trivialize how much I actually ate. Deceiving myself let me do what I wanted without feeling guilty about it. Self-deception is an important coping mechanism to the extent that it does not always result in extreme distortions of reality. Given that about 40% and above individuals engage in self-deception (Svenson, 1981; Baumeister, 2010), we are faced with the glaring truth of how we lie to ourselves about lying to ourselves!

    Sharlene Fernandes