Differences in perfectionism and happiness among classical and freestyle dancers

Dance is an art form that is practised and performed all around the world by a great mass of artists. A variety of dance forms also prevail over long decades of time. Happiness and perfectionism are certain common and important influential factors among the dancers. Perfectionism remains a personality trait and happiness is an important aspect of well-being in an individual. The present study tries to investigate the relation between these factors and analyse the differences in them among the people who perform classical and freestyle dances. A total of 100 dancers including both classical and freestyle dancers in equal size were considered for the present study. The Subjective Happiness Scale (1999) and Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (1990) were the tools used to analyse the extent of happiness and perfectionism among the population and the results were statistically analysed using Pearson’s correlation, independent sample t-test and simple linear regression. The study concluded that happiness and perfectionism are unrelated and that happiness level shows no much difference among the differing styles of dance. Perfectionism is revealed to differ within the different dance styles with a higher level in the classical dancers and hence the style of dance is a predictor of a dancer’s perfectionism.