Multimodal Emotion Associations in Music and Dance
Members of the SYREN Modern Dance Company creating stimuli for our dance project.
Music and dance both express emotion.
Do they use similar cues to represent emotion to viewers? This is the question that I, along with collaborators Daniel Shanahan and Lindsey Reymore, sought to answer.
Using quantitative and qualitative methods, we found that dancers expressing grief and fear are more social towards each other than dancers expressing melancholy, consistent with the idea that grief and fear may be social, overt emotions, whereas melancholy may function as a self-directed, covert emotion.
Fear
Grief
Melancholy
For example, on average, the dancers spent a greater proportion of time in physical contact with one another when improvising on grief (63% of the time) and fear (62% of the time) than when improvising on melancholy (27% of the time).
In an interview, the SYREN dancers shared that, when expressing grief, the emotion was a shared group experience among the dancers, but when expressing melancholy, each dancer wanted to remain alone.