The psychology of professional and student actors: Creativity, personality, and motivation.

Publisher: Public Library of Science Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 101285081 Publication Model: eCollection Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1932-6203 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 19326203 NLM ISO Abbreviation: PLoS One Subsets: MEDLINE

Original Publication: San Francisco, CA : Public Library of Science

Creativity* ; Motivation* ; Personality*; Students/*psychology; Adult ; Aged ; Emotional Intelligence ; Female ; Humans ; Male ; Middle Aged ; Personality Tests ; Reproducibility of Results ; Uncertainty ; Young Adult

As a profession, acting is marked by a high-level of economic and social riskiness concomitantly with the possibility for artistic satisfaction and/or public admiration. Current understanding of the psychological attributes that distinguish professional actors is incomplete. Here, we compare samples of professional actors (n = 104), undergraduate student actors (n = 100), and non-acting adults (n = 92) on 26 psychological dimensions and use machine-learning methods to classify participants based on these attributes. Nearly all of the attributes measured here displayed significant univariate mean differences across the three groups, with the strongest effect sizes being on Creative Activities, Openness, and Extraversion. A cross-validated Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) classification model was capable of identifying actors (either professional or student) from non-actors with a 92% accuracy and was able to sort professional from student actors with a 96% accuracy when age was included in the model, and a 68% accuracy with only psychological attributes included. In these LASSO models, actors in general were distinguished by high levels of Openness, Assertiveness, and Elaboration, but professional actors were specifically marked by high levels of Originality, Volatility, and Literary Activities.
Competing Interests: Michael Doherty’s affiliation with Actor’s Equity Association did not and does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and material.

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Date Created: 20201022 Date Completed: 20201208 Latest Revision: 20201214

20240105

PMC7580901

10.1371/journal.pone.0240728

33091923