Inner Dancing

The NMDT network is excited to announce the final of our three workshops, which collectively aim to bridge contemporary neuroscience of dance, performing arts and creative therapies in identifying key concepts and mechanisms of brain change during dance.

Inner Dancing will focus on the neuro-cognitive processes underlying the reception and integration of signals from inside the body and feeling where the body is in space

Our first guest speaker is Dr Vasiliki Meletaki whose interests are in how art and design can be used to promote wellness and facilitate emotion regulation in general and clinical population. Her research interests include among others the influence of expertise and psychophysiological characteristics in aesthetic and emotional experiences. Before joining the lab, she was in the Laboratory of Cognitive Neurosciences of CNRS in Marseille, working on interoceptive and psychological characteristics and bodily self on people with vestibular disorders. She received her PhD in Psychology from City, University of London investigating facial emotion perception and brain – body interactions on sensorimotor experts and specifically professional ballet dancers.

Dr Vasiliki Meletaki’s talk ‘Interoception, Body Awareness and Dance Expertise‘ will offer an overview of interoception literature and explore how dance expertise might affect interoception, body awareness, and emotion. Professional dancers seem to show a stronger body awareness and perceive emotions differently in comparison to non-dancers control participants, but the studies on cardiac interoception using the heartbeat counting task are currently inconclusive. Evidence suggests that dancers develop an artistic and motor expertise expanding beyond their familiar dance movements but across domains on social and body perception. The findings and potential ideas for a deeper understanding of the relationship dancers have with their bodies and how these ideas can be incorporated into dance therapy practices will be discussed.

Our second guest speaker is Prof Helen Payne. Prof Helen Payne is based at the University of Hertfordshire where she supervises a number of PhD candidates, teaches on doctoral, MA and Continuing Professional Development programmes in health, wellbeing and education. Since 1990 she has been accredited as a United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy psychotherapist and is a Fellow of, and Senior Registered dance movement psychotherapist with the Association for Dance Movement Psychotherapy/DMP. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, supervises and examines doctoral candidates internationally.

Prof Helen Payne’s talk ‘The BodyMind Approach for Medically Unexplained Symptoms and the Role of Interoception‘ will illustrate how The BodyMind Approach derived from dance movement psychotherapy as an evidence and practice-based method supports self-management for people experiencing physical symptoms for which there is no medical explanation. It will highlight how practices focussing on interoception can mediate co-morbid anxiety theorised though the somatic error hypothesis. As an exemplar an invitation to participants to join in a short experiential practice will be offered.