Acting is a fascinating phenomenon whereby individuals modify their physicality to portray another person and persuade audiences that they are indeed said person. Historically, and with the goal of creating realistic characterizations, acting theorists have debated if actors must begin either from the internalized driving forces of the characters or from external manifestations of the characters’ physical expression. However, regardless of whether actors have to actually feel the emotions of the characters who they portray during a performance, the challenge for the actor remains the same: to produce compelling representations of persons who they themselves are not. This production is physical by its very nature and can therefore lend itself to being gesturally coded, systematized, and modeled. To explore the question of whether character performances can be modeled, I designed and validated a classification scheme of character conceptualizations. I examined if a set of prototypical characters extracted from the literature were conceptually shared amongst a large group of raters, and found that character concepts were indeed shared. In addition, I found that character concepts could be modeled along the two orthogonal personality-trait dimensions of assertiveness and cooperativeness. I then sought to validate this model behaviourally. I designed a novel performance experiment whereby a group of professional actors performed a subset of characters from the model while I recorded their vocal and facial gestures. I found that actors used their vocal and facial gestures contrastively to differentiate between the characters, as well as between their performance-related and non-performance selves. Furthermore, I found that vocal gestures could be predicted by changes in the level of a character’s assertiveness. Complementary to this, I
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found that facial gestures could be predicted by changes in the level of a character’s cooperativeness. Finally, I conducted a cross-modal examination of character and emotion performances and found that characters and emotions, as testable or “functional” units of performative behaviour, share a similar dimensional relationship. My data provide validated support for a dimensional behavioural model of character performance and character classification. My research extends previous findings on acting and emotions and provides new evidence for the quantification and predictive modeling of the products and processes of acting as a whole. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / When acting, actors change their outward physicality to portray another person and persuade audiences that they are that person. Regardless of training or method employed by an actor, this production is ultimately physical and can therefore be recorded, analyzed, and modeled. I investigated this using a novel character classification scheme. I found that stock characters taken from Western literature were shared conceptually amongst a large group of raters and could be modeled along the two personality-trait dimensions of assertiveness and cooperativeness. I tested this new model in a performance experiment, measuring the vocal and facial gestures of a group of professional actors. I found that actors used their vocal and facial gestures to differentiate between characters that differed in personality. I discovered that vocal gestures could be predicted by changes in the level of a character’s assertiveness and, complementary to this, that facial gestures could be predicted by changes in the level of a character’s cooperativeness. Finally, I examined character and emotion performances in both the voice and face and found that characters and emotions share a similar dimensional relationship. My research extends previous findings on acting and emotions and provides new evidence for modeling of the products and processes of acting as a whole.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/27003 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Berry, Matthew |
| Contributors | Brown, Steven, Psychology |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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