A cross-cultural empirical investigation of aesthetic responses to an Iranian dance style

The empirical aesthetics of dance is a relatively recent field of investigation, and most research has been focused on the aesthetic experience of observers when perceiving different Western dance styles. It is well-known from other domains that prior exposure and familiarity modulate value formation and aesthetic judgment. Dance cultures vary considerably with regard to emotional expressivity and types of movements used. Therefore, we hypothesised that culturally-dependent emotional expressivities and the choice of movements within a choreography would modulate observers’ aesthetic experience. Across three experiments, with a total of 242 Iranian and English participants, we investigated cross-cultural aesthetic judgment to dance movements of an Iranian dance style. We asked how culture group, intended emotional expressivity, type of movement, motion energy and luminance interacted in aesthetic judgments of expressivity, beauty and liking. Taking advantage of a newly developed Iranian dance movement library, we found a general effect of culture and of emotion. Iranians generally rated the stimuli higher than English participants did, and joyful movements were preferred overall. Iranians found lower body and staccato movements more beautiful than English participants did – likely due to the subtle role of lower body movements, unfamiliar to English observers, in Iranian dance. While motion energy (but not luminance) had some influence on aesthetic judgment, intended emotion and movement type were stronger modulators of expressivity, beauty and liking judgments. This Iranian dance style is a largely unknown dance genre in many parts of the world and holds great promise as a subject for empirical aesthetics.