Crafting Emotion: A Mixed-Method Analysis of How Professional Actors Evoke and Experience Emotional States

Abstract

Building on literature that suggests that there are both benefits (e.g., increased empathy and social cognition) and risks (e.g., psychological discomfort during or after emotionally intense practices) related to the practice of acting, this study addresses a gap in psychology research by investigating cognitive control and emotion regulation processes that could be involved in creating emotional states in acting. Using a mixed-methods design, this project aims to examine whether “inside-out” acting training is associated with interoceptive awareness, emotion regulation, and theory of mind, as well as with any potential short- and long-term unwanted psychological discomfort felt by actors. The study is divided into quantitative and qualitative parts. In the quantitative phase, participants completed the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) questionnaire, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), and a modified version of the ERQ. As the original ERQ tests for the ability to down-regulate emotions, and I hypothesized that up-regulation would be used in acting, the modified ERQ contained questions that were inverted to inquire about up-regulation in acting contexts. Analyses examined associations between acting experience (class level and years of study) and these measures. The primary finding was that the MAIA total score increased significantly with both class level (F(2, 65) = 49.03, p .001) and years of study (F(4, 63) = 46.26, p .001), after Bonferroni, whereas the RMET and ERQ measures did not show significant associations. These results suggest that interoceptive awareness may increase with acting training, while other measured scales either may not be sensitive to acting training or may not be the appropriate measures, due to limitations such as the ceiling effect. In the qualitative phase, phenomenological interviews were conducted to help understand the findings of the quantitative phase. The participants were ten professional actors (ages 27–81) with training in inside-out techniques, all of whom had more than ten years of experience, representing multiple approaches (such as Method Acting, Meisner, Stella Adler, Uta Hagen, and mixed methods). Actors described multiple pathways to triggering emotional states (such as autobiographical memory, imagined future outcomes for the self, and imagined memories/futures for the character), and reported somatic sensations as markers of emotional arousal. They also reported that emotions could arise when they focused on the character's responses to circumstances, objectives, relationships, and environment, but less so when they consciously strived for a specific emotional state, suggesting that a loosening of top-down control may facilitate emotional experience during acting. Together, the mixed-method findings suggest that acting may cultivate interoceptive awareness and that actors rely on a number of personally tailored strategies to alter their emotional states, which could be better understood through future research controlling for specific acting techniques and situational contexts.