Dancesport, Adolescent Mental Health, and Social Skills: A Narrative Review of Psychological, Social, and Pedagogical Pathways
Abstract
review synthesizes theoretical and empirical literature from the doctoral research base to examine potential links between dance—especially
dancesport—and adolescent mental health and social skills. Proposed mental-health pathways include embodied movement and body awareness, non-verbal emotional expression, rhythmic regulation, focused attention, mastery, perceived competence, and flow-like engagement.
Social pathways include non-verbal communication, observation, imitation, partner coordination, cooperation, trust, rule-governed interaction, belonging, and social learning. Benefits are not automatic: competitive evaluation, aesthetic expectations, emotional labor, body-related
pressure, and gendered norms may create developmental challenges. Evidence on structured dancesport among Chinese adolescents remains
limited, and findings from clinical DMT, older populations, or other dance forms cannot be generalized uncritically. Future research should be
multidimensional, longitudinal, and pedagogically explicit, measure mental-health and social-skill outcomes separately, and treat mechanisms
as hypotheses unless directly tested.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.70711/wef.v4i6.10207
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