Skip to navigation | Skip to content


Researchers uncover dance moves to impress

Nightclub scene with a couple dancing in foreground

Men hoping to impress women on the dance floor now have science to help them (Source: Yuri Arcurs/iStockphoto)


British and German researchers filmed 19 men, aged between 18 and 35, with a 3-D camera system as they danced to a basic rhythm, and then mapped their movements onto featureless, white, gender-neutral humanoid characters, or avatars.

Their results appear in Royal Society Biology Letters.


"This is the first study to show objectively what differentiates a good dancer from a bad one. Men all over the world will be interested to know what moves they can throw to attract women," says psychologist Dr Nick Neave of Britain's Northumbria University.

The study, which also involved German's University of Gottingen , found that eight movement variables made the difference between a "good" and a "bad" dancer.


The analysis was concentrated on three body regions: legs including the ankle, hip and knee, the arms with shoulder, elbow and wrist, and the central body with neck and trunk.

The study found that female perceptions of good dance quality were influenced most greatly by large and varied movements involving the neck and trunk. The speed of the right knee movements were also important in signalling dance quality.

A "good" dancer thus displays larger and more variable movements in relation to bending and twisting movements of their head/neck and torso, and faster bending and twisting movements of their right knee," the researchers write.

Honest signals

Neave and fellow researcher Kristofor McCarty from Northumbria's School of Life Sciences say the study was the first to identify potential biomechanical differences between "good" and "bad" male dancers.

Neave said he believes such dance movements may form honest signals of a man's reproductive quality, in terms of health, vigour or strength.

He intends to continue research to grasp the implications, but studying dancing in a natural setting is hard as it then also brings in facial attractiveness, height, clothing and socio-economic status.



McCarty says it did seem that women appear to like and look for the same sort of moves.

"From this, we predict that those observations have underlying traits associated with them but further research must be conducted to support such claims," he says.

Tags: dance, anthropology-and-sociology, sexuality