Psychological perspectives on acting, redux

Acting is everywhere - film, television, theatre, and everyday performances such as work presentations, leisure activities, and pretend play with children. Yet psychology has historically paid very little attention to what skills, physiological states, and psychological mindsets are needed to act, as noted in Goldstein, 2009. Happily, over the last two decades multiple studies on the major psychological components of acting have produced exciting discoveries, and new questions have arisen. For such a commonly watched activity that involves all the components of human behavior and emotion, it remains strange that acting as an empirical area of study continues to be underdeveloped. Nonetheless, the field is now ripe for nuanced work and interdisciplinary questions from multiple perspectives.