The way to a woman's heart

 By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent

The Hollywood actor's flamboyant dance moves from the cult disco film are of the kind that is the most attractive to women, new research by scientists has revealed.
Researchers studied the freestyle dancing techniques commonly deployed by hapless men in nightclubs, to determine which were most likely to impress female onlookers.
Among their findings they concluded that exaggerated "dad" dancing, as demonstrated by David Brent in the television comedy series The Office, was the least attractive.
Another style unlikely to win a woman's heart was "the shuffle", where self-conscious males shift from foot to foot accompanied with the occasional uncomfortable hand-wring.
Highly-coordinated and complex dance moves, such as the point-and-shake moves employed by Travolta's character Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, were deemed the most attractive.
Dr Peter Lovatt, a psychologist of performance at Hertfordshire University, explained that dancing in nightclubs was the modern human equivalent of courtship displays used by birds and other animals.
"It is all about how we communicate through dance," he said. "There is an evolutionary reason why we dance in a particular way – as Darwin suggested, dancing is a bit like a courtship ritual to catch the eye of a high-quality member of the opposite sex.
"I wanted to examine which features of the dances we see in nightclubs make men seem more masculine, dominant or attractive."
Dr Lovatt, who was a professional dancer before he went into academia, filmed 15 short video clips of himself performing different dance moves and blurred out his physical features so that only his movements were visible.
He showed the videos to 55 women and asked them to rate how masculine, dominant and attractive each dance move was. He found that timid dancers who shuffle from foot to foot in small movements were deemed to rate lowest for all three characteristics, while large, unco-ordinated movements were also deemed unattractive but were thought to be most dominant.
Highly-coordinated, complex movements that were of medium size were found to be the most attractive.
Dr Lovatt said he hoped his work would provide some tips for those who struggle on the dance floor, whether they are teenagers or older dancers.
He said: "Increasingly we are seeing more divorced and single men going out to salsa nights and clubs in the hope of finding a woman. In other studies, we found older men rate themselves as poor dancers.
"Not everyone can pull off the coordinated and complex moves. It is thought this might be linked to the amount of testosterone we are exposed to while still in the womb.
"So for those people who dance with small movements, the best thing they can do to is to put in a few random movements. This was seen as being significantly more dominant and attractive, as you become more eye-catching by putting in movements that people don't expect.
"Large random dance movements, where arms and legs were flying all over the place, were very unattractive. The most effective thing those people can do to increase their attractiveness is to keep things simple – open and close their legs and arms in time to the music."
Dr Lovatt and his colleagues are to demonstrate some of their research at Health and Human Sciences Research Institute Showcase at Hertfordshire University later this month.
Men attending the event will be invited to have their testosterone levels measured before having their own dancing skills rated. The team will then offer them tips on how to improve the way they appear on the dance floor.
But Dr Lovatt maintains that not all dancing is intended to make men appear attractive, and that some dance styles instead convey different messages.
He said: "Hip hop dancing contains a great deal of very large, asymmetric and what might appear random movements, so dominance is clearly expressed. Ballroom dancing is more difficult as there are carefully-prescribed moves, while salsa combines a freestyle element."
Sue Goodman, artistic coordinator of the Step into Dance project at the Royal Academy of Dance, which teaches young people how to dance in schools, said people often forget about the messages that dancing can communicate about their personality.
She said: "Dancing style very much reflects what is going on inside a person's head. If they are self-conscious, that will be reflected in the way they dance.
"For men in nightclubs, if they are doing big controlled movements, they are giving off a sense of strength and control. That sends the message they are feeling good about themselves.
"In our project, we often find at the end of the year that the school children we work with gain in confidence and feel happier after learning how to dance, so it is clear the difference this can make."

Watch video:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3179332/John-Travolta-style-dancing-is-the-way-to-a-womans-heart.html
To have your own dancing rated visit www.healthshowcase.co.uk

Men who visit the Health Showcase at the University of Hertfordshire can have their ears and fingers measured and dance moves scrutinized to get a rating on their expected attractiveness to women.
Dr Lovatt will be at his stand at the Showcase on Tuesday 21 October between 6-9pm and on Thursday 23 October from 8-10.15am and 6-9pm.
Dr Peter Lovatt from the University's School of Psychology will host a stand at the Showcase when he will test his hot-off-the-press research findings into what it is about the way a man dances that attracts a woman.
He will measure men's ears and fingers to assess levels of prenatal testosterone and physical symmetry on the basis that it s accepted that men with symmetrical ears and for whom the fourth finger is considerably longer than the second finger, have high levels of prenatal testosterone.
He will then either invite them to dance or to describe their dance moves so that he can predict their attractiveness to women.
Dr Lovatt, who teaches on the only Psychology of Performance degree-level course in the UK, carried out some research over the summer into what features of men's freestyle dance communicate dominance, masculinity, attractiveness and quality (DMAQ) to women.
Bearing in mind two previous studies in this field which showed that female ratings of DMAQ of men's freestyle dance are associated with levels of prenatal testosterone and symmetry, Dr Lovatt, himself an ex-dancer, asked 55 women to rate him dancing in 12 different ways. The findings suggest that the ratings of DMAQ are influenced differentially by interactions between the size and degree of coordination of movement.
"The implication of these findings is that high testosterone men are unlikely to share a common pattern of dancing which leads to them all being rated as universally attractive,” said Dr Lovatt. “At our Showcase, we could help men with low prenatal testosterone to dance the dance of high testosterone by just varying their moves on the dance floor.”
The Health and Human Sciences Research Institute Showcase will host a variety of research being conducted by the University of Hertfordshire and will be held at the de Havilland Campus from 21-24 October.
From the University of Hertfordshire web site

Diagnosing your dancing style
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7680000/7680799.stm

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