Most attractive dance moves revealed

Schools in the Dutch city Rotterdam no longer accept sexual dance moves during school formals, writes Dutch newspaper “AD” today. Nowadays, it’s all about “daggering”, a dance style in which the movements are made by boys and girls who rub their genitals against each other. However, from now on students will be punished when they do “dagger”. But, don’t be disappointed boys! According to a 2010 study there are better ways to impress the girls on the dancefloor.

A team of psychologists led by Dr Nick Neave at of Northumbria University’s School of Life Sciences used advanced 3-D motion capture technology to analyse the movements of nineteen male dancers, creating computer generated ‘avatars’ so that all the dancers had identical features.  They then asked a group of women to rate the attractiveness of each of the dancers based on their movements. The team discovered that the key features of the most attractive dancers’ movements were based on the speed and movement of the right knee, along with the size and variation in neck and back movements.

Dr Neave said: “This is the first study to show objectively what differentiates a good dancer from a bad one. Men all over the world will be interested to know what moves they can throw to attract women.  We now know which area of the body females are looking at when they are making a judgement about male dance attractiveness. If a man knows what the key moves are, he can get some training and improve his chances of attracting a female through his dance style.”

If you want to put this useful advice into practice, have a look at the videos below which show idealised examples of attractive and unattractive dancing, as rated by the female participants in the experiment.

Source: ScienceNOW

Neave N, McCarty K, Freynik J, Caplan N, Hönekopp J, & Fink B (2011). Male dance moves that catch a woman’s eye. Biology letters, 7 (2), 221-4 PMID: 20826469

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