📋 Tender Overview
An international research team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, conducted an in-depth study of our experiences when watching dance. The results show that our acculturation to a particular culture influences how we interpret emotions in a dance and perceive beauty and meaning in movement. This study comprises three publications in academic journals. The most recent publication was just released in Perception. Oct 6, 2026, 12:00:00 PM Ina Wittmann , Max-Planck-Institut fur empirische Asthetik Carl Sermon and MaShuqa The team consisted of experts in psychology, dance, computer science, and history from research and cultural institutions around the world. This interdisciplinary project focused on an Iranian dance style, a cultural tradition that has received little attention in academic research so far. The researchers filmed a professional dancer who performed dance movements expressing various emotions and compiled these as short video clips into a movement archive. This allowed the researchers to examine how people from different cultural backgrounds and levels of acculturation perceive the same performances.The researchers conducted five separate studies, involving more than 500 participants from Iranian, English, and Southeast Asian backgrounds. They found that people do not directly read emotions from body movements. Rather, their own cultural experiences shape how they interpret body movements. For instance, individuals more familiar with Iranian culture were more likely to perceive joyful emotions in the presented Iranian dances, reflecting the festive occasions in which this dance style is typically performed.The study also showed that cultural background influences our aesthetic perception of dance. While people from different backgrounds often enjoyed the performances equally, their previous cultural experiences affected which movements they found to be particularly expressive or beautiful.What matters here is not a persons nationality or country of origin, but rather their familiarity and embodied experience with a cultural tradition, reports Julia F. Christensen of the MPIEA. She is the first author of the first two publications and the senior author of the last one. An important outcome is the demonstration that culture is not an all-or-nothing trait. Rather than categorizing people into fixed cultural groups, it seems more informative to measure each individuals degree of cultural experience and acculturation. This provides a more accurate picture of how culture shapes perception and aesthetic experience.Beyond its scientific findings, the project has created a valuable new resource for future research: a systematically organized video library of emotionally expressive Iranian dance. By bringing together expertise from various academic disciplines, the project offers new insights into the relationship between culture, emotions, and artistic expression. The results demonstrate how collaboration between the natural sciences and the humanities can deepen our understanding of artistic expression across cultures. Contact for scientific information: Max Planck Institute for Empirical AestheticsDr. Julia F. Christensenjulia.christensen@ae.mpg.de Original Publication: Khorsandi, S., Vartanian, M., Wald-Fuhrmann, M., Frieler, K., Ullen, F., Farahi, F., Yazdi, S. H. N., Bravo-Serra, S., & Christensen, J. F. (2026). A Cross-Cultural Empirical Investigation of Aesthetic Responses to an Iranian Dance Style. Perception. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/03010066261478531Christensen, J. F., Khorsandi, S., Ullen, F., Cross, E. S., Frieler, K., Vartanian, M., & Wald-Fuhrmann, M. (2026). Enculturation Modulates Aesthetic Judgments of Dance. Journal of Cultural Cognitive Science, 10, 267-285. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41809-026-00206-z Christensen, J. F., Frieler, K., Vartanian, M., Khorsandi, S., Farahi, F., Yazdi, S. H. N., Bravo Serra, S., & Walsh, V. (2025). An Enculturation-Induced Joy Bias for Emotion Recognition in Full-Body Movement. Scientific Reports, 15(1), Article 37163. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-24332-w Source: https://idw-online.de/de/news878594
