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Silent disco: dancing in synchrony leads to elevated pain thresholds and social closeness.

ABSTRACT: Moving in synchrony leads to cooperative behaviour and feelings of social closeness, and dance (involving synchronisation to others and music) may cause social bonding, possibly as a consequence of released endorphins. This study uses an experimental paradigm to determine which aspects of synchrony in dance are associated with changes in pain threshold (a proxy for endorphin release) and social bonding between strangers. Those who danced in synchrony experienced elevated pain thresholds, whereas those in the partial and asynchrony conditions experienced no analgesic effects. Similarly, those in the synchrony condition reported being more socially bonded, although they did not perform more cooperatively in an economic game. This experiment suggests that dance encourages social bonding amongst co-actors by stimulating the production of endorphins, but may not make people more altruistic. We conclude that dance may have been an important human behaviour evolved to encourage social closeness between strangers.

SUBMITTER: Tarr B

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4985033 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Silent disco: dancing in synchrony leads to elevated pain thresholds and social closeness.

Tarr Bronwyn B Launay Jacques J Dunbar Robin I M RI

Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society 20160224 5

Moving in synchrony leads to cooperative behaviour and feelings of social closeness, and dance (involving synchronisation to others and music) may cause social bonding, possibly as a consequence of released endorphins. This study uses an experimental paradigm to determine which aspects of synchrony in dance are associated with changes in pain threshold (a proxy for endorphin release) and social bonding between strangers. Those who danced in synchrony experienced elevated pain thresholds, whereas ...[more]

PMID: 27540276

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Project description:Auditory and visual percepts are integrated even when they are not perfectly temporally aligned with each other, especially when the visual signal precedes the auditory signal. This window of temporal integration for asynchronous audiovisual stimuli is relatively well examined in the case of speech, while other natural action-induced sounds have been widely neglected. Here, we studied the detection of audiovisual asynchrony in three different whole-body actions with natural action-induced sounds-hurdling, tap dancing and drumming. In Study 1, we examined whether audiovisual asynchrony detection, assessed by a simultaneity judgment task, differs as a function of sound production intentionality. Based on previous findings, we expected that auditory and visual signals should be integrated over a wider temporal window for actions creating sounds intentionally (tap dancing), compared to actions creating sounds incidentally (hurdling). While percentages of perceived synchrony differed in the expected way, we identified two further factors, namely high event density and low rhythmicity, to induce higher synchrony ratings as well. Therefore, we systematically varied event density and rhythmicity in Study 2, this time using drumming stimuli to exert full control over these variables, and the same simultaneity judgment tasks. Results suggest that high event density leads to a bias to integrate rather than segregate auditory and visual signals, even at relatively large asynchronies. Rhythmicity had a similar, albeit weaker effect, when event density was low. Our findings demonstrate that shorter asynchronies and visual-first asynchronies lead to higher synchrony ratings of whole-body action, pointing to clear parallels with audiovisual integration in speech perception. Overconfidence in the naturally expected, that is, synchrony of sound and sight, was stronger for intentional (vs. incidental) sound production and for movements with high (vs. low) rhythmicity, presumably because both encourage predictive processes. In contrast, high event density appears to increase synchronicity judgments simply because it makes the detection of audiovisual asynchrony more difficult. More studies using real-life audiovisual stimuli with varying event densities and rhythmicities are needed to fully uncover the general mechanisms of audiovisual integration.

Dataset Information

Silent disco: dancing in synchrony leads to elevated pain thresholds and social closeness.

Publications

Silent disco: dancing in synchrony leads to elevated pain thresholds and social closeness.

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