The evidence almost nobody writing for actors cites
Somebody actually asked the actors.
Diderot said the great actor feels nothing. Stanislavski's followers said the opposite. The argument ran for two centuries on assertion alone, and then a psychologist went and collected data.
Elly Konijn, at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, published Acting Emotions in 2000. She questioned roughly three hundred professional actors in the Netherlands, Belgium and the United States about what they actually experience while performing.
Most actors seldom actually experience the emotions they are portraying on stage as they perform a character. However, the analysis does determine that actors in performance experience intense emotions of a different order.Elly Konijn, Acting Emotions, Amsterdam University Press, 2000
Emotions of a different order. She gave them a name, and it is the most useful piece of vocabulary in this chapter.
I have called these emotions task-emotions and these are related to the actor as professional.Konijn, on what actors feel instead
Concentration. Tension. The pressure of being watched. The pull of doing something difficult while people wait. The satisfaction when it goes well and the drop when it does not.
You are not failing to feel. You are feeling the job, at full volume, which is exactly what any person doing something demanding in front of others would feel.
And then the finding that ends the argument.
Konijn compared actors trained in emotionally involved technique against actors trained in detached technique, and measured how closely their own feelings matched the character's.
It appears that exercising an emotionally ‘involved’ acting technique does not yield greater correspondence between the emotions of the actor and the character than exercising a ‘detached’ style of acting.Konijn, Acting Emotions — the empirical answer to the Diderot question
Read that slowly, because it is a stronger claim than it looks. The involved technique does not deliver the thing it promises to deliver. Actors trained to feel it do not end up feeling more of what the character feels than actors trained not to.
What the scanners show, and what nobody has tested
Two small studies, and one very large gap.
There is a real research literature on what acting does to the person doing it. It is thinner than you would expect, and honest about that.
There has been little research that directly explores the process and pleasures of realistic acting.Thalia Goldstein and Paul Bloom, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2011
What does exist points in a consistent direction. In 2019 Steven Brown and colleagues at McMaster put actors in a scanner and had them answer questions as themselves and then in character.
Compared to responding as oneself, responding in character produced global reductions in brain activity and, particularly, deactivations in the cortical midline network of the frontal lobe … Thus, portraying a character through acting seems to be a deactivation-driven process, perhaps representing a ‘loss of self’.Brown, Cockett & Yuan, Royal Society Open Science 6:181908, 2019
There is now one partial replication, and it is a good one. In 2022 a team using wearable sensors on six professional actors during actual rehearsal played each actor their own name at random. Hearing your own name normally produces a distinct response. During acting, it was absent. Different lab, different method, real rehearsal room, same direction — which is worth more than either study alone. It also had six people in it.
What actors are actually good at.
The other robust finding is a deflating one, in a useful way. Goldstein and colleagues found that actors outperform non-actors on theory of mind — reading and modelling what is going on in someone else's head. On emotional empathy they reported entirely ordinary levels.
You do not have to be an unusually sensitive person to act. The measurable difference is a skill at modelling other people, not a greater capacity to feel. Their conclusion is that strength in theory of mind can exist independently of strength in empathy.
And the experiment nobody has run.
Here is the honest state of a century-old argument. Nobody has ever tested whether feeling it produces better acting. Take actors trained to feel it and actors trained not to, film them doing the same scene, and ask an audience which is better. That study does not exist.
The nearest thing is from 2021. Panero and Winner had 44 acting students and 43 non-actors perform the same monologue, measured their dissociation, flow and empathy, and had the performances rated.
Surprisingly, acting ratings were unrelated to levels of dissociation, flow, or empathy … they may not be necessary to create the illusion of an imaginary character come to life on stage.Panero & Winner, Frontiers in Psychology, 2021
Those three states together explained 2.5% of the variation in how good the acting was judged to be, and not significantly. It is a null result in a small study with two raters, so it cannot prove that feeling does not help. It is also the only evidence there is, and it does not support the traditional claim.
Most of what happens in a good class is this. Very little of it requires anybody's private history.
Untangle the language first
Three different practices share one name.
This is the first thing on the page for a reason. Most people arrive frightened of a technique they are not actually being asked to use.
Heat, weight, texture, smell, the ache of a wet collar. The goal is specificity, so that an imaginary condition becomes concrete enough for your body to respond to it.
A comparable relationship or situation, standing in for the character's. It does not have to be identical, and it does not have to be the worst instance you have.
You return to a real distressing experience of your own in order to produce the emotion the scene requires. This is the contested one.
And a great deal of what gets taught as sense memory is genuinely the first one — the disciplined imagining of a cup of tea. That is not a lesser version of the technique. It is the version with a hundred years of quiet usefulness and no controversy attached.
The direction the field has travelled.
One pattern is worth knowing, because it tells you the choice is not between commitment and cowardice.
And one more, in fairness to the man this chapter is largely about: we could not get hold of Strasberg's own book, A Dream of Passion. So everything we can verify about his technique is written about him rather than by him. On a page concerning actor wellbeing that asymmetry matters, and we would rather say so than let it pass. A rule he is often said to have taught — that a memory should be at least seven years old before you use it — appears only on acting blogs, with no citation to anything he wrote. If it is genuine it is the best safety advice in the whole tradition, and it deserves better than folklore.
The useful half
Sense memory, and a five-minute exercise that costs you nothing.
Acting constantly asks you to respond to things that are not there. Cold air on a warm set. A heavy prop made of foam. Food in an empty cup. Rain that gets added in October.
It is to make the imaginary world touchable. Everything downstream — behaviour, attention, the way you handle an object — follows from having something specific to respond to.
The exercise. An ordinary object, nothing from your history.
Choose something emotionally neutral. A mug of tea, a clean towel, a piece of fruit, morning light on a wall. Sit comfortably and take one sense at a time.
Observe the real object for one minute
Actually hold it. Most people skip this and go straight to imagining, which is why their imagining is vague.
Put it down and recreate one sensation
One only. The temperature, or the weight. Not the whole object.
Add a second detail, without forcing anything
If nothing vivid arrives, that is not a failure. This is a skill that sharpens with light, repeated practice.
Do one simple action
Take a sip. Dry your hands. Peel the fruit. The action is where it stops being a meditation and becomes acting.
Stop at five minutes, and name five things you can see
Out loud, in the real room. It takes ten seconds and it draws a clear line under the exercise.
The most practical evidence on this page
There is a science of changing how you feel, and it has a clear verdict.
James Gross at Stanford spent thirty years on emotion regulation. His model gives an actor two things: a vocabulary for what technique actually is, and one strategy to stop using.
Gross defines emotion regulation as the processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions. He sorts the strategies into five families, and the order matters — the first four happen before the emotion, the last one happens after.
Approaching or avoiding certain people, places or objects. For an actor: choosing the material, and choosing what you walk into the room having just done.
Actively changing the situation to alter its emotional impact. For an actor: this is given circumstances. Raise the stakes and the feeling follows.
Distraction, concentration, rumination. For an actor: where you put your attention — which, in every chapter of this course, means the other person.
Modifying how you appraise the situation. For an actor: substitution, imagination, the magic if. Reappraisal is the studied version of this.
Directly influencing the physical, experiential or behavioural response. For an actor: holding it together. And this is the one with a cost.
Almost everything acting training calls “technique” lives in families two, three and four — changing the situation, moving your attention, changing how you see it. Gross calls these antecedent-focused. They work on the emotion before it arrives.
Only the last family works afterwards, and it is the one an actor reaches for when they are trying to keep a take together.
The head-to-head, and the numbers.
In 1998 Gross ran 120 people through a disgust-inducing film in three conditions: reappraise it, suppress the expression, or just watch.
Compared with the control condition, both reappraisal and suppression were effective in reducing emotion-expressive behavior. However, reappraisal decreased disgust experience, whereas suppression increased sympathetic activation.James Gross, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74(1), 1998
And the finding that should change what you do in a two-hander.
In 2003, Butler and colleagues had pairs of women who had never met discuss an upsetting topic, with one of each pair secretly instructed to suppress, reappraise, or behave normally.
Suppression alone disrupted communication and magnified blood pressure responses in the suppressors' partners … Suppression also reduced rapport and inhibited relationship formation.Butler, Egloff, Wilhelm, Smith, Erickson & Gross, Emotion 3(1), 2003
Reappraisal did not do this. The person suppressing raised the blood pressure of the person opposite them. They damaged the communication between them, and made it harder to build any rapport. The partner had no idea anything was being suppressed.
Which is a measured, published, physiological argument for something acting teachers have been saying for a century. Do not hold it in. Change the situation, or change how you are seeing it, and let what happens happen.
Does the outside-in route work?
Making the face, and a lesson in how to read evidence.
Some traditions say the expression produces the feeling. The story of how that claim was tested is worth more to you than the claim itself.
In 1988 a famous experiment had people hold a pen in their teeth, which forces a smile, or in their lips, which blocks one. The teeth group found cartoons funnier. The effect was 0.82 units on a ten-point scale, and it became one of the most cited findings in psychology.
The hypothesis survived. The method was what failed. Hiding a smile inside a pen trick does nothing; being asked to make the expression on purpose produces a small, real nudge — and that is the condition an actor is actually in.
So: yes, arranging your face does something. It moves you about half a point on a seven-point scale. It is a nudge, not a generator, and nobody has tested it with trained actors in a performance.
The posture evidence lands in the same place, and we covered it in the movement chapter. A meta-analysis of 73 studies found that collapsing dampens how you feel, at a moderate effect size, while expansive posture adds essentially nothing over sitting normally. The instruction supported by the evidence is not “stand powerfully”. It is stop collapsing. That analysis has itself been disputed in print, which is worth knowing.
Where to put your attention instead
Seven routes to the same place, none of them requiring your history.
Every one of these has appeared elsewhere in this course, which is the point. They converge.
The most-searched question in this topic
How do you cry on cue? Nobody has studied it.
That is the honest answer, and it is more useful than a list of tips, because it tells you not to treat the ability as a measure of anything.
There is a serious research literature on human crying. Ad Vingerhoets at Tilburg has spent a career on it. None of it addresses whether tears can be produced on demand, who can do it, or whether it has any relationship to being a good actor.
Some people can produce tears at will. Most cannot. There is no evidence it measures talent, commitment or emotional depth, and a great deal of very good screen acting contains no tears at all.
The workable version is the one this whole course keeps arriving at: put yourself in circumstances where a person might cry, attend fully to the other person, and permit whatever happens. A performance visibly trying to produce tears is visibly a performance trying to produce tears.
One aside with a point in it. A study across 37 countries found that people in wealthier, more democratic and more individualistic countries report crying more often. Crying frequency tracks cultural permission to express, not amount of suffering. Which is worth remembering the next time somebody treats how easily you cry as evidence about who you are.
A serious correction to a widely quoted statistic
What the wellbeing research actually found.
There is one large survey of actors that everyone quotes and almost nobody has read. We read it, and the most-repeated number in it is being reported wrongly.
The study is Maxwell, Seton and Szabó, “The Australian Actors' Wellbeing Study: A Preliminary Report”, published in About Performance in 2015 from data collected in 2013. 782 usable responses, recruited through the performers' union.
You will find it written everywhere that “80% of actors actively use legal or illegal drugs to cope with the pressure of their roles.” That sentence is wrong in three separate ways, and we traced it to a single blog post.
One. The clause “to cope with the pressure of their roles” is invented. The 80% comes from a general drug-use screening questionnaire that asks how often you use various substances, full stop. It is not connected to roles, work or pressure anywhere.
Two. The figure is simply the inverse of scoring zero on that screen — and the screen explicitly excludes correctly-used prescriptions. One non-prescribed painkiller in the reference period puts you inside the 80%. The denominator is also 582, not 782.
Three, and decisively: in the same paragraph the study's own authors describe the same data as showing “relatively low levels of drug use”, benchmarked against a prison-inmate comparison group. The number being quoted as alarming is one the researchers characterised as reassuring.
The honest version is in the third card above, and it comes from the question that actually asks about work: 28.8% said none. Alcohol was the most common answer at 36.7%. Illegal drugs were named by 6.8%. That is a real and worth-knowing finding, and it is nothing like the sentence in circulation.
The same blog also carries claims that actors are “10 times more likely” to suffer anxiety and “5 times more prone” to depression. Neither appears in the study. What the study reports is that depression scores on a standard scale ran about twice as high as population norms — a scale score, which is not a prevalence ratio.
The researcher worth listening to.
Dr Mark Seton is an honorary research associate in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, and one of that study's authors. He has spent years on what happens to actors after demanding work, and coined a term for it in a 2006 conference paper: post-dramatic stress.
I deliberately coin this term, not as a diagnosis, but as both an evocation and a provocation to encourage further conversation and, hopefully, remedial action.Mark Seton, “‘Post-Dramatic’ Stress: Negotiating Vulnerability for Performance”, 2006
We are quoting the caveat with the term deliberately. Post-dramatic stress is not a clinical condition, its author says so plainly, and any page that implies otherwise is misusing his work. What he is naming is a real and under-discussed experience, and his sharpest observation is about the silence around it.
Other actors continue to suffer in shame and silence through lack of open conversation about the challenges of both creating and letting go of such roles.Mark Seton, writing for StageMilk
The most important section on this page
You can decline an exercise, and there is a framework behind that.
If you take one thing from this chapter, take this one. It is not a special accommodation and you do not have to justify it.
Trauma-informed practice is now taught in actor training. Jessica Hartley, at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, published on it in 2024, and her statement of the problem is exact.
We are working in a field where the students' bodies and positionalities are the basis for their ‘work’.Jessica Hartley, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 15(2), 2024
The framework she works from has six principles, set out by the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in 2014. They transfer to a rehearsal room without any adjustment at all.
Four things you are entitled to say.
“What skill are we training here, and is there a version that doesn't use my own life?” A good teacher has an answer ready.
You can do an exercise without narrating your childhood to the room. You do not owe anyone your history as proof of commitment.
An ordinary sensory memory is legitimate practice. So is an analogy held at a comfortable distance.
Distress is not evidence that an acting exercise is working. You can end it, at any point, without explaining why.
It is the direction Stanislavski, Adler, Meisner, Chekhov and most of the field have travelled over the last century. You are not opting out of the tradition. You are standing where the tradition ended up.
And a teacher who penalises you for exercising choice is demonstrating precisely the problem the field is currently correcting.
If an exercise leaves you with distress that does not lift, or difficulty functioning afterwards, stop doing it and speak to an appropriate qualified professional. An acting teacher is not one, should not be diagnosing anybody, and a good one will say so first.
This chapter is written to give you information and vocabulary, not to treat anything.
The ending nobody teaches
De-roling is just a clear finish. And the honest news is that it is barely studied.
You do not need a ritual. You need a short sequence that tells your body, your attention and your surroundings that the work has stopped.
The term comes from drama therapy rather than actor training, and the distinction is worth knowing. When performers de-role they do something that reinforces who they are apart from the character. When they debrief they talk through the experience of having played it.
We looked for a controlled study showing that de-roling works and did not find one. Sally Bailey, one of the practice's leading advocates, is straightforward about its standing: “De-roling is not a common practice in acting, but it's used all the time in drama therapy because you're working with clients who are very vulnerable.”
And the drama therapist Robert Landy supplies a corrective to anyone promising too much. “There is no such rarified position as a fully de-roled human being.” You are not being scrubbed clean. You are drawing a line.
The one concrete technique in the literature, from Susana Bloch: slow, regular, full breathing cycles followed by a complete release of the facial muscles.
Take off whatever you were wearing for it. Then stretch, walk, wash up, put things away — something physical and completely ordinary.
“That's finished. I'm in my flat.” Then contact a person about something entirely unrelated.
Five minutes, no equipment, no mysticism. Treat it as the cool-down at the end of movement training, or the warm-down at the end of voice work. This course teaches both of those without anyone finding it strange.
In the wellbeing survey, alcohol was the single most common thing actors named for relaxing after a demanding role. The default de-roling technology in this industry is a drink, and it is worth having a second option that costs nothing and does not compound.
The bit this site should be saying
Heavy material, alone, at eleven at night.
Affective memory work was developed in a rehearsal room, with a teacher present, over weeks, surrounded by other people. Almost none of that is true of a self-tape.
Use analogous material rather than the real thing, if you use anything of your own at all. Cap the takes before you start — the preparation research says three, not twenty, and over-taping degrades the work regardless. De-role deliberately, precisely because the structure gives you nothing. And do not schedule the heaviest scene for last thing at night when you have any choice about it.
None of that is precious. It is the same category of advice as warming up your voice before a long day, and nobody argues about that one.
Where the sources genuinely disagree
The contradictions, laid out.
Six real disputes, and we have taken a position on each, with the reasoning set out above.
Do actors feel the character's emotions?
The assumptionThe whole apparatus of emotional recall exists to produce exactly that.
KonijnRoughly three hundred professionals say they seldom do — and that they feel something else, intensely. She calls them task emotions.
Does involved technique deliver more feeling?
Its whole claimThat is the point of it.
Konijn againNo greater correspondence between actor and character emotion than a detached technique produces.
Does feeling it make the acting better?
A century of teachingAssumed, everywhere, and never tested.
The one studyDissociation, flow and empathy together explained 2.5% of the variation in acting quality, non-significantly.
Should you hold a feeling in?
It looks like controlAnd it does reduce what shows.
Gross and ButlerSuppression does not reduce the feeling, raises your own sympathetic activation, and raises your scene partner's blood pressure.
Is refusing a lack of commitment?
The traditional attitudeSerious actors go there.
Trauma-informed practiceEmpowerment, voice and choice is a stated principle of the framework. It is not a concession.
Does de-roling work?
It is taught in drama therapyAnd practitioners report it helps.
The evidenceNo controlled study. Its own advocates say it is not common practice in acting, and the industry default remains the bar.
It does not hold well enough to publish. The landmark 2000 study was rats, a tone, a shock and a protein-synthesis inhibitor injected into the amygdala. Whether that erases a memory or merely blocks its retrieval is still unresolved — the authors' own follow-up says there is no unique interpretation of their result. The human work has an active replication dispute at its centre, including a registered replication of one of the flagship studies that failed. And a 2023 review states the core problem plainly: it is typically impossible to tell whether what you are seeing is a modified memory or an intact memory you cannot reach.
Applying any of that to complex autobiographical human memory would be several steps beyond what anyone has shown. So we are not telling you that neuroscience proves emotional recall damages your memories. It does not, yet, and the case for care in this chapter does not need it.
Your imagination is an acting tool. Your pain is not an entrance fee.
Make the place real with your senses. Give yourself something to do to somebody. Put your attention on them rather than on whether you are feeling enough.
Then finish properly, leave it where you did it, and go and have your evening.
Back to the fundamentals