Most attractive dance moves revealed

08 September 2010

New research published today in Royal Society journal Biology Letters reveals one of the most coveted secrets for generations of hipsters – exactly which dance moves are most attractive to women.

A team of psychologists led by Dr Nick Neave at 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 subsequently used sophisticated mathematical techniques to analyse exactly what the key features of the most attractive dancers’ movements were.  These turned out to be based on the speed and movement of the right knee, along with the size and variation in neck and back movements.  If this sounds difficult to put 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.

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.”