The appreciative experience of dance as art: a conceptual and empirical investigation.

Abstract

Despite the growing research on dance appreciation in psychology and philosophy, there is no comprehensive interdisciplinary approach, and there are still pending areas that merit further study. Based on current theoretical perspectives and research approaches, this project identifies two main areas of conceptual and methodological gaps. One refers to the conceptual definition of dance and dance appreciation assumed in psychological research. The other concerns the dance stimuli and the operational definitions used in previous research of dance appreciation. Overall, these two gaps result in a problem with the ecological validity of previous research approaches. To overcome this limitation, two types of methodology are adopted in this study: conceptual analysis and empirical correlational methods.The first part of the dissertation addresses the conceptual gap by developing a new conceptual framework of dance appreciation through two studies that analyse the concepts of dance, and dance appreciation. The underlying assumption guiding most of psychological research is that appreciation is identical to liking, and that the experience while perceiving dance movement counts as the same as an experience of appreciating dance as an artistic object. These assumptions are unwarranted and not responsive to the nature of dance as art phenomena and dance appreciation as a subtype of art appreciation. While there is a conceptual overlap between liking, aesthetic experience and art appreciation, closer inspection reveals that the distinction between them is conceptually and psychologically significant. Therefore, previous research approaches are grounded on a category-mistake, they confound the aesthetic and the artistic domains, and are based on oversimplified definitions of both dance and dance appreciation.The conceptual framework developed in part I is applied in part II, that consists in two empirical studies that design a scale of dance knowledge in an online survey (Study I), and explore the dimensionality of dance appreciation and the effect of expertise in two contemporary dance performances (Study II). Finally, conclusions and guidelines for future research are provided.