Thalia R. Goldstein

Enhancing Empathy and Theory of Mind.

Social cognitive skills such as empathy and theory of mind are crucial for everyday interactions, cooperation, and cultural learning, and deficits in these skills have been implicated in pathologies such as autism spectrum disorder, sociopathy, and nonverbal learning disorders. Little research has examined how these skills develop after early childhood and how they may be trained. We tested the hypothesis that experience in acting, an activity in which one must step into the shoes of others, leads to growth in both empathy and theory of mind. In two studies, we followed children (elementary school aged) and adolescents (high school freshmen) receiving 1 year of either acting or other arts training (visual arts, music) and assessed empathy and theory of mind before and after training. In both studies, those receiving acting (but not other arts) training showed significant gains in empathy scores; in Study 2, adolescents receiving acting training also showed significant gains on a naturalistic measure of theory of mind, the Empathic Accuracy Paradigm. These findings demonstrate plasticity in empathy and theory of mind long past the watershed age of 3 to 4 years and suggest that both capacities are enhanced by role-playing.

The mind on stage: why cognitive scientists should study acting.

One of the main pleasures of contemporary life is the observation of realistic acting-in dramatic theatre, television comedies, award-winning movies, and pornography. However, realistic acting is relatively new; before the early 20th century, performance was highly stylized, closer to what we would think of as pretense or oration [1]. What goes on in the process of realistic acting? And why do we enjoy it so much?

Engagement in Role Play, Pretense, and Acting Classes Predict Advanced Theory of Mind Skill in Middle Childhood:

Research on theory of mind in typically developing children has focused almost exclusively on universal achievements up to age 5. Far less is known about how theory of mind skills develop in middle childhood and adolescence. We investigated later-developing theory of mind achievements to determine the kinds of behaviors associated with skill in theory of mind. Engaging in role play and pretense, as reported by parents, and engagement in acting classes predicted theory of mind skill in 8- to 11-year-olds independently of socio-economic status (SES), age, and verbal IQ. These findings show that the proclivity to role play is related to the ability to understand and perceive others internal states.

No support for the claim that literary fiction uniquely and immediately improves theory of mind: A reply to Kidd and Castano’s commentary on Panero et al. (2016).

Kidd and Castano (in press) critique our failure to replicate Kidd and Castano (2013) on 3 grounds: failure to exclude people who did not read the texts, failure of random assignment, and failure to exclude people who did not take the Author Recognition Test (ART). This response addresses each of these critiques. Most importantly, we note that even when Kidd and Castano reanalyzed our data in the way that they argue is most appropriate, they still failed to replicate the pattern of results reported in their original study. We thus reaffirm that our replication of Kidd and Castano (2013) found no evidence that literary fiction uniquely and immediately improves theory of mind. Our objective remains not to prove that reading literary fiction does not benefit social cognition, but to call for in-depth research addressing the difficulties in measuring any potential effect and to note the need to temper claims accordingly. (PsycINFO Database Record

Dramatic pretend play games uniquely improve emotional control in young children

Pretense is a naturally occurring, apparently universal activity for typically developing children. Yet its function and effects remain unclear. One theorized possibility is that pretense activities, such as dramatic pretend play games, are a possible causal path to improve childrens emotional development. Social and emotional skills, particularly emotional control, are critically important for social development, as well as academic performance and later life success. However, the study of such approaches has been criticized for potential bias and lack of rigor, precluding the ability to make strong causal claims. We conducted a randomized, component control (dismantling) trial of dramatic pretend play games with a low-SES group of 4-year-old children (N = 97) to test whether such practice yields generalized improvements in multiple social and emotional outcomes. We found specific effects of dramatic play games only on emotional self-control. Results suggest that dramatic pretend play games involving physicalizing emotional states and traits, pretending to be animals and human characters, and engaging in pretend scenarios in a small group may improve childrens emotional control. These findings have implications for the function of pretense and design of interventions to improve emotional control in typical and atypical populations. Further, they provide support for the unique role of dramatic pretend play games for young children, particularly those from low-income backgrounds. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/2GVNcWKRHPk.

Can Guided Play and Storybook Reading Promote Children’s Drawing Development?:

Children’s drawings are implicated in their emotional, cognitive, artistic, and semiotic development, raising the question of how early educators may best facilitate drawing development. This study compared three activities to determine their relative efficacy in promoting children’s drawing. Seventy-seven preschoolers from a Head Start program were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: storybook reading, block building, or dramatic pretend play games (DPPG). Interventions were conducted over 8 weeks, and children’s free drawings during each session were rated on five dimensions: creativity, talent, spatial complexity, color, and human content. Taken together, the interventions produced significant growth in overall drawing, particularly for children who were initially more skilled at drawing. Comparisons indicated that storybook reading and block building generated significantly better overall drawing than DPPG. Story time was more beneficial than DPPG for creativity, talent, and spatial complexity, while block building was more beneficial than DPPG for children’s use of color.

Facial expressions as performances in mime

ABSTRACT That facial expressions are universal emotion signals has been supported by observers agreeing on the emotion mimed by actors. We show that actors can mime a diverse range of states: emotions, cognitions, physical states, and actions. English, Hindi, and Malayalam speakers (N = 1200) viewed 25 video clips and indicated the state conveyed. Within each language, at least 23 of the 25 clips were recognised above chance and base rate. Facial expressions of emotions are not special in their recognisability, and it is miming that may be the universal human ability.

The Interpreted Mind: Understanding Acting.

Acting is everywhere: TV, movies, and theater. Yet psychologists know surprisingly little about how acting is processed and understood by viewers. This is despite popular, scholarly, and journalistic obsession both with how actors are able to create characters with fully realized personalities, emotional arcs, physical attributes, and skills, and with whether actors and their characters merge during or after performance. Theoretically, there are several possibilities for how audience members process actors and acting: as literary fiction; as if someone is telling a lie; like essentialist traits and states; or like the personalities and emotions of real people in our every day lives. The authors consider each of these possibilities in turn. They then present 3 studies investigating the amount audiences conflate actors’ and characters’ characteristics (N = 231) by asking participants directly how much they perceive actors as experiencing the characteristics they portray (Study 1), by showing short video clips of actors and asking participants how much they thought actors were experiencing what they portrayed (Study 2) and by asking participants to judge the overlap in personality characteristics between actors and characters (Study 3). Overall, audience members are conflating actors and their characters. However, how much depends on the characteristic being portrayed and the knowledge of the audience. We propose a theoretical model of when and how audience members think of actors and their characters as blended, and we lay out a research agenda to determine how acting and actors are understood.

The Constricted Muse: Acting

While most laypeople and audience members would easily and quickly put acting in the “creative arts” category, what is actually creative about portraying the words of a playwright, in a realistic and recognizable manner, for many performances? Acting does not necessarily involve generation of new material – rather, most acting takes place in a collaborative environment, as an interpretation of a playwright’s, director’s, and designer’s combined and unified vision. We therefore break down the issue of creativity in acting into three components: the process of creating a performance, the person creating the performance, and the product of the performance itself. We review the scant literature in this area, and conclude with research suggestions both for how to determine if an actor’s performance is creative, and for how to define and measure the process of acting through the lens of creativity. Lynn Fontanne, a famous stage actress of the mid-twentieth century, when asked to explain what actors do when they act, replied “We read the lines so that people can hear and understand them; we move about the stage without bumping into the furniture or each other; and, well that’s it” (Lyons, 1955). And while Fontanne was speaking of certain style of acting needed for a certain style of playwriting, there may be a larger truth to the way she describes her craft. Put the way Fontanne describes, it can be easily argued that acting is not very creative. And, even if you disagree with Fontanne’s assessment of what an actor does, it still raises the question: “What is essentially creative about acting?” If acting is supposed to be the authentic portrayal of the world, human emotion, behavior, and relationships, can the claim be made that acting is creative, or is it more of an interpretive practice? In the same way that one may make the claim that a photo-representational piece of art is aesthetically pleasing, engaging, or representative of talent while not being creative, it may be that acting can be powerful, moving, aesthetically pleasurable, and impressive in its virtuosic performance. Yet, because acting is necessarily representational and extends the work of the playwright, it cannot be creative. However, as most actors and laypeople might disagree with the assessment that acting is not “creative,” it is important to clarify the various aspects of acting and how each may or may not involve creativity. This requires us to look in three places: the actor, (i.e., is a person who engages in acting creative?); the process, (i.e., as a

Is it Oscar-worthy? Children's metarepresentational understanding of acting.

Although it is an essential aspect of one of the most common forms of entertainment, psychologists know almost nothing about how children understand the act of portraying a character in a realistic manner—realistic acting. Do children possess the sort of meta-theory of acting that adults possess? In two studies we find that, unlike adults, children between the ages of 3–5 do not think that a realistic actor is better at portraying a characteristic than a nonrealistic actor, nor do they prefer one to the other. As they develop, they come to understand that realistic acting is different from nonrealistic acting, but unlike adults, children think that a nonrealistic, pretense-like portrayal is more difficult to achieve than a realistic representation of an emotional or physical state. These findings show that children’s metarepresentational understanding of acting is relatively immature at age 5, and that their understanding of this specific domain of pretense lags behind their understanding of pretense in general.