Save the Last Dance for Me: Dynamic Cues and Social Perception

社会知觉是人类对社会关系做出决定的过程。对吸引力、温暖、能力和许多其他社交因素的感知几乎出现在所有的社交互动中。我们遇到的人总是根据他们对我们所做的事情、我们的举止和外表的感知来做决定。之前关于吸引力、温暖和能力等影响社会认知的因素的研究在很大程度上依赖于使用静态线索作为刺激，比如图片。然而，在现实的社会环境中，感知并不是基于静态刺激产生的，相反，社会感知强烈依赖于行走和跳舞等动态线索。这项跨学科研究旨在研究行走和跳舞等动态线索与图片等静态线索对吸引力、温暖和能力的社会感知的作用。研究将使用运动捕捉技术来捕捉参与者行走和跳舞的动作，这些动作将被用作评分员的刺激，评分员将对刺激的吸引力、温和度和能力进行评分。之所以选择步行作为研究对象，是因为它是社交场合中最常见的影响社会感知的动态因素。跳舞提供了另一个悖论。虽然性二型性通常在脸部、声音等方面很有吸引力，但传统上，舞蹈强调优雅和优雅等女性特质。与其他动态或静态线索不同，这个项目将测试舞蹈中的性二态是否与吸引力有关；因此，舞蹈是否模糊了男性和女性之间的区别。

Social Perception is the process by which humans make decisions about social relationships. Theperception of attractiveness, warmth, competence and many other social factors occur in almost allsocial interactions. People we meet are constantly making decisions based on their perception of whatwe do, how we move and look.Previous studies on factors that influence social perceptions made about attractiveness, warmth andcompetence have heavily relied on using static cues as stimuli, like pictures. However, in actual socialsettings, perception does not occur based on static stimuli, instead social perception strongly relies ondynamic cues like walking and dancing.This inter-disciplinary research aims to study the role of dynamic cues like walking and dancing asopposed static cues like pictures, on the social perception of attractiveness, warmth and competence.The research will use motion-capture technology to capture the movements of walking and dancing fromparticipants, which will be used as the stimuli for raters who will rate the stimuli on attractiveness,warmth and competence.Walking is chosen to be studied as it is the most common dynamic factors that are present in socialsituations that affect social perception. Dancing offers a further paradox. While sexual dimorphism isgenerally attractive in terms of the face, voice, etc., traditionally feminine qualities such as grace andfinesse are emphasized in dance. This project will test whether sexual dimorphism is associated withattractiveness in dancing, unlike other dynamic or static cues; hence whether dance blurs thedistinctions between masculinity and femininity.