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Humans have used dance as a healing art since the beginning of human history, but dance therapy has only begun to be recognized as a formal profession since the mid-1940s. At that time, dancers living in the USA began using dance as a therapeutic medium in health-care settings. Since then, the field has expanded across the world, with dance therapists now practicing in most countries. Professional associations have been established, training courses set up, and processes for registering therapists with government authorities implemented. This article provides an international overview of these developments. Detailed information about progress and challenges in the advancement of the dance therapy profession is offered across six world regions. Progress includes expansion of geographic range to countries where no formal training or networks exist, including many developing nations. Barriers to progress include lack of university-based accredited training and low numbers of professionals, making the establishment of a critical mass of practitioners difficult. Suggestions for future development of the profession internationally are made.

This study investigates the relationship between change in kinesthetic ability and the development of empathy in a group of Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) trainees. Art Therapy and Social Science students served as comparison groups. A field study was conducted using a quasi-experimental pre-post control group design. Participants were 62 graduate students. A standard self-report measure of empathy was used, and kinesthetic ability was evaluated using a table of movement dimensions based on Laban Movement Analysis (LMA). In addition, DMT participants were interviewed regarding perceived change in empathy and in movement ability. The results suggested an increase in kinesthetic ability among the DMT cohort. The self-report measure of empathy suggested no significant change in all groups, and yet, interviews of the DMT trainees showed an increase in empathy. Standardized empathy scores were correlated with increasing kinesthetic ability displayed in outward movement, echoing and sunken posture. The results suggest that empathy can be developed through training for the benefit of the emotional health of both patients and trainees.

Emotion recognition is an important developmental achievement in early childhood. Grounded in theoretical concepts of family systems theory and the spillover effect, the goal of the current study was to examine whether prenatal spousal support predicts toddler emotion recognition at 24 months, and whether this association is mediated by parental embodied mentalizing (PEM) at 6 months. PEM refers to the parent's capacity to understand the infant's mental states from his or her whole‐body kinesthetic expressions and adjust their own kinesthetic patterns accordingly. One hundred and five families expecting their first child were included in the study. Results indicated that maternal PEM mediated the relationship between prenatal dyadic positive and overall support and toddler emotion recognition. Paternal PEM was not found to be related to either dyadic support or to toddler emotion recognition, and it did not mediate the relationship between the two. The findings of the current study support the importance of including both parents’ embodied mentalizing and a systemic approach to illuminate child development. A significant clinical implication from this study is the usefulness of prenatal couple interventions to improve mutual support and communication as it can promote parents’ parental mentalizing and ultimately the child's emotion recognition capacity.

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