Interacción diádica en baile deportivo: características psicológicas

Practice of sports dance has grown strongly in recent years as a representative discipline of stable mixed duos. However, scientific literature on its psychological characteristics remains scarce. This paper was intended to investigate the characteristics of sports dancing through interviews with competing couples. Twelve active dancers (M age = 30.75 years; SD = 8.75) forming 6 stable duos were interviewed. The semi-structured interview developed was based on previous research and included questions about communication, rules, cohesion, leadership, roles, and collective efficacy. The results show that the rules of the duos are few, flexible, evolutionary, and implicit. Both task and social roles are exercised with no performance difficulties. Communication is characterised by a high density and the continuous presence of feedback in interactions. Leadership is shared and focused on the needs of the components. Finally, the couples reported the difficulty to find and/or maintain a dance partner. The main study conclusion is that sports dance duos are subjected to a constant search for balance, which leads them to distribute task roles and thus share leadership and maximize communicative interaction.