Moving me, moving you: emotional expressivity, empathy, and prior experience shape whole-body movement preferences

Aesthetics shape and color almost every aspect of our daily lives, from the products we interact with and the clothes we wear to the design of our homes and cities. However, many people associate aesthetics with art, and an historical academic interest in the factors that shape the experience of engaging with art has yielded rich insights into our understanding of the value and ubiquity of empirical aesthetics. While most existing research has focused on music and the visual arts, there is a growing interest in the aesthetics of human movement among empirical aesthetics researchers. In the present study, we sought to examine how individual differences in global empathy and previous movement experience influence aesthetic evaluations of dance sequences. Observers (N = 55) completed a self-report measure of global empathy (Toronto Empathy Questionnaire), provided an assessment of their prior dance experience (via the Goldsmith’s Dance Sophistication Index) and rated a series of whole-body point-light display movements (imbued with happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and nonexpressive neutrality) from the McNorm Library (Smith & Cross, 2023) in terms of beauty and liking on 100-point slider scales. Participants demonstrated a general preference for emotionally expressive movement sequences, while specific types of emotional expressivity influenced liking, but not beauty, judgments. Additionally, differences in both prior dance experience and levels of global empathy influenced aesthetic evaluations of the McNorm Library dance clips. We consider the implications of these results for empirical aesthetics and social perception research and discuss how empirical aesthetics research in this area may be of interest, or use, to dance practitioners.