Date of Award

Fall 2025

Project Type

Dissertation

Program or Major

Psychology

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

First Advisor

John D Mayer

Second Advisor

David Kaye

Third Advisor

Thalia R Goldstein

Abstract

The goal of an actor is to become invisible, bringing a character to life so convincingly that the audience forgets the actor exists outside the role. Different schools of acting often describe differing methods of portraying characters to this same general effect. To followers of the Meisner school, for example, “acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances” (Meisner et al., 1987). The “truthful” part involves creating a comprehensive mental model of a character’s imagined personality in order to fully embody that personality and extrapolate it to a situation. Then the actor uses a variety of acting techniques to think and behave as they believe the character would within the scripted actions and context of a scene. The conceptualization and use of mental personality models to guide and predict behavior also describes the skills most associated with personal intelligence; a broad intelligence concerned with reasoning about personality information (J. D. Mayer, 2008). The goal of the present research is to study personal intelligence’s role in successful acting, with a focus on how acting techniques may relate to personal intelligence and other individual differences theoretically linked to acting by the great instructors of that discipline. This research will lead to future studies that empirically test the relationships established here to strategically develop performing arts based interventions or educational tools. In particular it is my hope that the results of this study substantiate the creation of an acting-based program aimed at raising personal intelligence using the exercises of existing pedagogies.

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