Summary Of The Laban Effort-Shape Theory

This ability to encode and decode emotions is an ability that most human beings acquire at some point in their life. Dancing is a special emotion that can be explained through the movement of your body. In this experiment, the goal was to see if happiness and sadness had any effect on dance movement. Many, if not all, people put emotions into their dancing that are perceived to the audience through the music and the movement. If portrayed the right way, the sight of that movement can infact be a moving experience. The hypothesis of this research was that there should be an effect of emotional state on movements of the entire body. Basically, the body should react and move differently when it is feeling different emotions. The researcher’s expected the participants to move faster and on impulse. They thought the participants limbs would outstretch more and go higher with different feelings. The size of the group of participants was 32 adults. There were 16 males and 16 females. The researcher’s picked their participants based on their musical and dance background. The majority (75%) of the participants had received training in music. The rest of the participants (34%), had been trained in dance for a certain amount of time. A great majority of …show more content…
This means that they examined some movement cues for emotions and the range of movement cues. The Laban’s Effort-Shape Theory has two key components. One component is effort and the other is shape. For this experiment, the effort they looked for was the energy the participant had whilst dancing. For shape they looked at the changes in movement of the participant. They calculated velocity, acceleration, impulsiveness, and expansion for both the happy and sad conditions. The researchers obtained this information by having the participant wear a motion capture suit so the movements could be captured and measured at a later date if