AUTHOR=Jola Corinne , Pollick Frank E. , Calvo-Merino Beatriz 

TITLE=“Some like it hot”: spectators who score high on the personality trait openness enjoy the excitement of hearing dancers breathing without music

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 8 - 2014

YEAR=2014

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00718

DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2014.00718

ISSN=1662-5161

ABSTRACT=An integral part of dance is music.  Over the last ten years, however, dance stimuli have been repeatedly used to study action observation processes without music, increasing our understanding of the influence of observer’s physical abilities on action perception.  Moreover, beyond trained skills and empathy traits, very little has been investigated on how other observer or spectators’ properties modulate action observation and action preference.  Since strong correlations have been shown between music and personality traits, here we aim to investigate how personality traits shape the appreciation of dance when this is presented with 3 different music/sounds.  Therefore, we investigated the relationship between personality traits and the subjective aesthetic experience of 52 spectators watching a 24 min lasting contemporary dance performance projected on a big screen containing three movement phrases performed to three different sound scores: classical music (i.e. Bach), an electronic sound-score, and a section without music but where the breathing of the performers was audible.  We found that first, spectators rated the experience of watching dance without music significantly different from with music.  Second, we found that the higher spectators scored on the Big Five personality factor openness, the more they liked the no-music section.  Third, spectators’ physical experience with dance was not linked to their appreciation but was significantly related to high average extravert scores.  For the first time, we showed that spectators’ reported entrainment to watching dance movements without music is strongly related to their personality and thus may need to be considered when using dance as a means to investigate action observation processes and aesthetic preferences.