Скачать или смотреть Dance as a bridge between cultures - Julia Christensen

Dance as a bridge between cultures: Emotion perception from expressive body movement

While emotional expression via the body is universal across cultures, labelling emotions into ‘emotion-word’ categories is not innate, but learned. Based on previous work using Western expressive dance gestures, we designed a video-stimulus library with emotionally expressive dance gestures from Iran. The dance gestures were choreographed to express the five ‘basic’ emotions (anger, fear, joy, sadness and neutrality). Across five experiments with 400+ culturally Iranian, English and Southeast Asian participants, we tested how enculturation modulated the perception of expressive body language. Results showed that categorical labelling of expressed emotions was modulated by Western enculturation. Aesthetic judgment served as an implicit emotion recognition task and evidenced a universal emotion perception from Iranian expressive gestures, regardless of culture. In this talk, I introduce the dance stimuli library and the Iranian dance genre we studied for our project – to give an overview of our work on this project in the past 6 years. The project focussed on one overarching research question: what can we learn from and about each other through the dances we dance together?