Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Tango Your Way to Mental Health

Tango Dancers

Dancing around life’s inevitable difficulties while retaining mental and emotional balance can require some fancy footwork. For those suffering from stress and depression, newly published research finds a promising self-help program involves literally getting out on the dance floor. It’s hard to feel blue while you’re doing the tango. “Preliminary results suggest that tango dance is an innovative and promising approach, as effective as mindfulness meditation in reducing levels of self-reported depression,” writes a team led by psychologist Rosa Pinniger of the University of New ... Read More

Too Sexy, Too Soon? Not if You Hang Out at the Barre

Too Sexy, Too Soon?

A 7-year-old shouldn’t be concerned about her sex appeal. But there’s increasing evidence that the pressure to look, and act, alluring is being felt by younger and younger girls. How can parents help? A newly published paper provides several possible answers, including an unexpected one: Ballet lessons. “Our findings indicate that there is reason to be concerned about the early sexualization of girls,” Knox College psychologists Christine Starr and Gail Ferguson write in the journal Sex Roles. Their study of 6- to 9-year-old girls living in the Midwest found a strong desire to ... Read More

Mass Hysteria: From Dance Floors to Factory Floors

Do you have an uncontrollable desire to jump up and dance while watching “Dancing with the Stars”? Perhaps it’s not the music and excitement, but tarantism. In the 17th century, this urge to engage in a frenzied whirling dance, accompanied by nervous bouts of melancholy and hysteria, spread widely in southern Italy. The syndrome’s name comes from an energetic dance, the tarantella, a supposed cure for the venomous bite of a tarantula. The officially dubbed “tarantism” followed a 1518 outbreak when a woman danced for days in the streets of Strasbourg. Before long, dozens of ... Read More

Women Eye Dance Moves to Find Thrill Seekers

mmw-dancing-0112

It turns out the information women seek isn’t in a man’s kiss — it’s in his dance moves. Evidence of this nonverbal messaging system comes from a group of European researchers, led by the University of Göttingen’s Nadine Hugill, which videotaped 50 men and their moves. Sixty women watched the recordings and judged the hunkiness of each hoofer. Before hitting the dance floor, the men completed a survey measuring their propensity to engage in new and risky behaviors, including their penchant for “thrill and adventure seeking.” Their willingness to flaunt rules and take ... Read More

Apparently Wallflowers Will Not Pollinate

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even hardcore video gamers do it. Dance. We're talking about dance here, people. From the tribal lands of Africa, to the court of Louis the XIV, to the stage of FOX's So You Think You Can Dance, dance has been a pervasive part of human's history and culture. Today, if you're a male of our species and dance well, you'll garner the adoration of the ladies. But dance like you've got two left feet, and you'll have to find another way to impress the masses. But why? Well, according to research published recently in the journal Personality and Individual ... Read More