The assessment of involvement in role playing

Two experiments (N = 169) focused on involvement in role playing. Subjects rated their level of involvement after each enactment; in addition, a probe procedure was used with prompts, increasingly disparate from the content of the role play. In the first experiment, subjects role played an anger of sad scenario; both measures of involvement correlated with emotional response, but were not correlated with each other. In the second experiment, involvement was manipulated experimentally; both measures varied as expected with the manipulation.