Ballroom dance training promotes empathy

Ballroom dancing is a form of art and sport that helps improve sensorimotor skills, cognitive levels, and emotional communication. To achieve excellence, dancers must collaborate, imitate, and actively interact with their dance partners through long-term training. In this way, they are constantly involved in understanding and sharing their partner’s thoughts and feelings—this is what we call empathy.

A research team led by Dr. Hu Li and Dr. Kong Yazhuo of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Psychology has found evidence of behavioral and brain mechanisms that promote empathy through long-term ballroom dance training.

In their exploratory study, 43 professional ballroom dancers and 40 age- and gender-matched controls were recruited from Beijing Sports University. During the experiment, participants’ demographic information, arts and sports training information, and romantic relationship information were collected. Their trait of empathy, personality, and interpersonal relationship were assessed using the self-reported empathy scale, the self-reported personality scale, and the self-reported interpersonal scale.

High-resolution structural magnetic resonance (MRI) and functional resting-state MRI images were also collected to reveal the neural correlates of empathy.

According to the researchers, dancers showed significantly higher scores than controls in empathic concern on the three subscales of empathy (perspective taking, empathic concern, and personal distress). In addition, empathic concern correlated positively with years with dance partners (ie, the number of years the dancer has officially danced with a permanent dance partner).

Empathic concern is affective empathy directed toward others and involves a desire to promote the well-being of others or alleviate their suffering, which is widely considered to be the trait that motivates costly altruism and prosocial behavior.

So how did dance training increase empathic involvement in the brain? Analysis of brain structures revealed that subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) gray matter volume was significantly associated with empathic concern and years with dance partners.

Most importantly, the functional coupling between the ACC and the occipital gyrus plays a key role in mediating the relationship between years with dance partners and empathic concern, i.e., the longer dance partners train together, the more engagement between empathy-related brain regions and eventually more develops concern for other people.

This study reveals the close relationship between long-term ballroom dancing and empathy and the underlying brain mechanisms based on the structure and function of the ACC, providing new insights into enhancing empathy.

The study was published in Mapping of the human brain.