Buen Baile

"We found that (women paid more attention to) the core body region: the torso, the neck, the head. It was not just the speed of the movements, it was also the variability of the movement. So someone who is twisting, bending, moving, nodding."

Movements that went down terribly were twitchy and repetitive - so called "Dad dancing".
"The head and the neck and the torso can move around threedifferent angles - forwards and backwards, side to side, turn around - and somebody who's putting all those moves together, in a different way, and making them sometimes big and sometimes small, and showing variability, and flexibility, and creativity in the way that they move their head and their neck and their body, they will be percieved as a good dancer. A bad dancer is someone who engages in veryrigid, stereotypical movements. A head nod - a headbanger, for example, is a bad dancer."
Makes sense to me, huh. In so many ways.
I know that science reporting is often pretty dodgy. But in in this case they do tell us what journal the article is in, the Royal Society Biology Letters, which allows me to check the abstract and say that the news article doesn't go much beyond the abstractitself, which (in part) says this:
Linear regression subsequently revealed that three movement measures were key predictors of dance quality; these were variability and amplitude of movements of the neck and trunk, and speed of movements of the right knee. In summary, we have identified specific movements within men's dance that influence women's perceptions of dancing ability. We suggest that suchmovements may form honest signals of male quality in terms of health, vigour or strength, though this remains to be confirmed.

Indeed, it's possible that moving the core body region in a controlled, varied, creative and twisty way is just genuinely quite difficult, which I think is what they're saying with the technical sense of "honest", and certainly doesn't contradict my personal experience(hello, confirmation bias).

In fact I have several questions about this, such as how the subjects rated their own dancing, how other males rated the dancing, whether there was any definition of dancing, and whether the researchers went beyond the distinction between 'professional' and otherwise. Part of the abstract I didn't quote also implies that the dance of men was found to be moreinformative than the dance of women, and it would be interesting to know if that was true, or if they didn't measure any female subjects for some reason, or if there just wasn't enough difference between female subjects they measured to be able to tell. I also wonder what the overall goal of the study was and whether it's part of a wider programme of research. The article will be available for free in ayear's time; at the moment it costs a rather eye-popping £27, which I don't think I can justify.

And also, why the right knee? Did it matter if they were left-handed? In fact, can you tell from someone's dancing if he's left-handed or not? I know you can with at least some beginner tangueros, who (I remember noticing) if not given definite instruction or obstruction sometimes start with a motionto the right instead of the stereotypical leftward weight-change.
Apparently the speed of a man's right knee and the size and variety of movements of the neck and torso are key, they suggest.
Guys whose swagger included larger and more variable movements of the neck and torso were considered attractive by the ladies.
"This is the first study to show objectively what differentiates a good dancerfrom a bad one," said researcher Nick Neave, a psychologist at Northumbria University. "Men all over the world will be interested to know what moves they can throw to attract women."
Curiously, faster bending and twisting movements of the right knee also seemed to catch the eyes of women. As a potential explanation, the researchers noted that 80 percent of all people are right-footed, so most...