Shake your bootie and get more bootie. At least that's the message from researchers who say that better dancers do better in the love department. So where's the surprise in that? Well, it's taken until now for researchers to prove scientifically what we've all suspected for years. The study, by scientists at Rutgers University, links for the first time dancing ability to established measures of mate quality in humans. The journal Nature carries details of the study, where scientists created computer-animated figures that duplicated the movements of 183 Jamaican teenagers dancing to popular music. The animated figures were based on real dancers who had infrared reflectors affixed to 41 body locations to capture and measure detailed body movements.
The researchers then asked the study subjects to evaluate the dancing ability of these animated figures. The figures were gender-neutral, faceless and the same size - all to keep evaluators from boosting or dropping dancers' scores based on considerations other than the dance moves.
Interestingly, the researchers also evaluated each dancer for body symmetry, an accepted indicator in most animal species (including humans) of how well an organism develops despite problems it encounters as it matures. Symmetry, and its association with attractiveness, therefore indicates an organism's underlying quality as a potential mate. The study showed that higher-rated dancers typically had greater body symmetry.
Anthropologist Lee Cronk said that scientists have long suspected that dance plays a role in courtship. "But this has been hard to study because of the difficulty of isolating dance movements from variables, such as attractiveness, clothing and body features. By using motion-capture technology commonly employed in medical and sports science to isolate dance movements, we can confidently peg dancing ability to desirability," Cronk added.
The researchers also found that symmetric males received better dance scores than symmetric females and that female evaluators rated symmetric men higher than male evaluators rated symmetric men.
"In species where fathers invest less than mothers in their offspring, females tend to be more selective in mate choice and males therefore invest more in courtship display," the researchers concluded. "Our results with human subjects correlate with that expectation. More symmetrical men put on a better show, and women notice."
Based on material from Rutgers University
