Zhihu question: Do Actors Really Need Talent to Act?
They do.
A group of psychologists recently conducted a study on “acting talent,” and it’s quite interesting.
The most crucial thing an actor has to do to act a scene well is express a series of emotions convincingly.
One way we sense and regulate our emotions is by paying attention to and noticing our various bodily signals—for example, a racing heart when we’re afraid, or rapid breathing when we’re excited.
Peter Sokol-Hessner, an assistant professor at the University of Denver’s College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences, focused on this point. He and his colleagues wondered whether one kind of “talent” good actors possess might be a sharper ability to sense bodily signals related to emotion.
To test this idea, they conducted an experiment. They recruited 26 current students and graduates of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts graduate acting program, along with 11 other actors who had extensive performance experience. Another 29 people with no acting experience joined the study as a control group.
Here’s how the experiment worked:
The participants were fitted with a device that monitored their heart rate. Speakers in front of them played 10 tones at intervals (beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep). Their task was to judge whether these ten “beeps” matched the “thump, thump, thump” of their own heartbeat exactly.
As it turned out, the timing of the tones was carefully controlled by a computer program designed by the researchers. The program monitored each participant’s heartbeat in real time and played the tones according to its rhythm.
The researchers set up two conditions. In the first, the tones were synchronized with the heartbeat (each “beep” lagged only 200 milliseconds behind the heartbeat’s “thump”—the technical limit). In the second, the tones were out of sync (each “beep” lagged 500 milliseconds behind the heartbeat’s “thump”).
The participants simply had to decide whether each set of 10 tones was synchronized or out of sync. They repeated this for several rounds.
After each decision, the participants also used a mouse to indicate their “confidence in their judgment” on a 0-to-1 slider on the screen: 0 meant they were purely guessing, while 1 meant they were certain they had guessed correctly.
The result was that actors and non-actors showed no difference in their accuracy when judging whether the tones were synchronized. Both groups performed quite well overall.
But the second judgment—the participants’ assessment of their own confidence—revealed a significant difference between the two groups. When actors were not confident in their judgments, they really were more likely to be wrong; and when actors were highly confident, their actual accuracy was indeed higher.
So overall, actors were not significantly more accurate than ordinary people at judging bodily emotional signals. But on closer inspection, they sensed these signals more finely: when they picked up on them, they were more clearly aware that they had done so.
Earlier research has already shown that people who are more accurate at judging their own inner feelings tend to have richer emotional experiences, greater empathy, and better emotional regulation.
So actors’ finer sensitivity to bodily signals may indeed help them create and express emotions.
The deeper question is: when it comes to finer sensitivity to bodily signals and more impressive acting skills, which is the cause and which is the effect?
Do actors become more sensitive to bodily signals through acting practice? Or does that sensitivity make them more at ease—and more effective—when performing?
To examine this question, the researchers looked at the correlation between the amount of time the acting-school students in the experiment had studied at school and their accuracy on the second judgment above—the confidence judgment.
There was no correlation between the two. It seems that longer acting training cannot improve a person’s sensitivity to bodily signals. So it is more likely that people who already have some talent for sensing bodily signals discover their ability to act, and then pursue acting.
Greater sensitivity to bodily signals is more likely to be a “talent” that helps with acting than an ability developed through acting training.
p.s.:
This study included only a few dozen participants, so it is merely a preliminary study. The conclusions above still need to be tested with more experimental data.
Original research paper:
Sokol-Hessner, P., Wing-Davey, M., Illingworth, S., Fleming, S. M., & Phelps, E. A. (2022). The actor’s insight: Actors have comparable interoception but better metacognition than nonactors. Emotion.
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