Individual differences in acted emotions: An exploratory study into the role of interoceptive awareness in feelings prompted by emotion eliciting acting techniques

A significant part of the creative art of acting consists of arousing emotions appropriate to the character’s fictional circumstances and communicating them to an audience. This article describes a novel exploratory study which is a joint investigation of acted emotion from the perspectives of both psychology and acting pedagogy. We compare the impact on subjective emotional experience of two contrasting actor training techniques designed to enable performers to elicit and express emotion in aesthetic contexts: Emotion Memory versus Alba Emoting. We further explore how interoceptive awareness as an individual difference (sensitivity to bodily signals) influences an actor’s emotional response to the two techniques. Trainee actors (N = 8) attempted to arouse three target emotions (anger, sadness and joy) using each of the two techniques and recorded the level of subjective emotion experienced. Although both techniques were successful in eliciting the target emotion, reported emotional intensity was higher for Emotion Memory exercises. Further, high interoceptive awareness resulted in greater emotional intensity generated by Emotion Memory compared to Alba Emoting exercises, but vice versa for low levels of interoceptive awareness. Our results have implications for acting pedagogy in terms of the relationship between individual differences in interoceptive awareness and the effectiveness of selected acting exercises and have the potential to contribute to both psychological and artistic theories of emotion generation.