During the process of acting, actors have to embody the characters that they are portraying by changing their vocal and gestural features to match standard conceptions of the characters. In this experimental study of acting, we had professional actors portray a series of stock characters (e.g., king, bully, lover), which were organized according to a predictive scheme based on the 2 orthogonal personality dimensions of assertiveness and cooperativeness. We measured 12 prosodic features of the actors’ vocal productions, as related to pitch, loudness, timbre, and duration/timing. The results showed a significant effect of character assertiveness on all 12 vocal parameters, but a weaker effect of cooperativeness on fewer vocal parameters. These findings comprise the first experimental analysis of vocal gesturing during character portrayal in actors and demonstrate that actors reliably manipulate prosodic cues in a contrastive manner to differentiate characters based on their personality traits.

There is no established classification scheme for literary characters in narrative theory short of generic categories like protagonist vs. antagonist or round vs. flat. This is so despite the ubiquity of stock characters that recur across media, cultures, and historical time periods. We present here a proposal of a systematic psychological scheme for classifying characters from the literary and dramatic fields based on a modification of the Thomas-Kilmann (TK) Conflict Mode Instrument used in applied studies of personality. The TK scheme classifies personality along the two orthogonal dimensions of assertiveness and cooperativeness. To examine the validity of a modified version of this scheme, we had 142 participants provide personality ratings for 40 characters using two of the Big Five personality traits as well as assertiveness and cooperativeness from the TK scheme. The results showed that assertiveness and cooperativeness were orthogonal dimensions, thereby supporting the validity of using a modified version of TK's two-dimensional scheme for classifying characters.

Actors make modifications to their face, voice, and body in order to match standard gestural conceptions of the fictional characters they are portraying during stage performances. However, the gestural manifestations of acting have not been quantified experimentally, least of all in group-level analyses. In order to quantify the facial correlates of character portrayal in professional actors for the first time, we had 24 actors portray a contrastive series of nine stock characters (e.g., king, bully, lover) that were organized according to a predictive scheme based on the two statistically independent personality dimensions of assertiveness (i.e., the tendency to satisfy personal concerns) and cooperativeness (i.e., the tendency to satisfy others’ concerns). We used 3D motion capture to examine changes in facial dimensions, with an emphasis on the relative expansion/contraction of four facial segments related to the brow, eyebrows, lips, and jaw, respectively. The results demonstrated that expansions in both upper- and lower-facial segments were related to increases in the levels of character cooperativeness, but not assertiveness. These findings demonstrate that actors reliably manipulate their facial features in a contrastive manner in order to differentiate characters based on their underlying personality traits.

No abstract

Acting is a process of pretending to be someone whom the actor is not. Whereas acting is often considered to be a specialized skill of trained professionals, a simple and perhaps universal form of acting occurs during oral storytelling, in which the storyteller acts out the characters of the story during the moments of dialogue and self-reflection. To examine this skill experimentally, we had both trained actors and novices read 4 fairy tales aloud. The stories contained a series of contrastive characters that spanned age, gender, and species. The major dependent variables were the vocal parameters of pitch, loudness, timbre, and speech rate. The results demonstrated that participants created distinguishable acoustic profiles for each character within a story, regardless of the story’s familiarity. Monotonic trend analyses revealed the sequential changes in vocal parameters that were produced as a function of the age, gender, and species of the represented characters. Linear mixed-effects models showed a significant effect of acting training on character portrayal, with actors showing more-expansive pitch depictions than novices. We argue that portraying characters during story reading is one of the most fundamental forms of acting in human life.