Date of Completion
5-6-2022
Degree Type
Honors Thesis - Campus Access
Discipline
Psychology (PSYC)
First Advisor
Diana Santacrose
Abstract
Actors, trained to heighten their emotional awareness and regulate emotions across situations, have been shown to differ from other individuals in temperament, emotion perception, emotion regulation, and emotional beliefs. However, research has not explored connections between acting experience, emotional constructs, such as negative emotion differentiation (NED; the degree to which people can differentiate between negative emotional states) and difficulties in emotion regulation, and mental health symptoms. Higher NED is associated with increased use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies and decreased mental health symptomatology. We utilized a correlational design to examine NED, difficulties in emotion regulation, and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress in a sample of 360 undergraduates with varying levels of acting experience. It was hypothesized that increased acting experience and NED will predict lower mental health symptoms, while emotion dysregulation will positively predict mental health. We also predicted that acting experience would moderate the relationship between emotion dysregulation and mental health, as well as the relationship between NED and mental health. Difficulties in emotion regulation and acting experience independently predicted increased mental health symptoms, but acting experience did not moderate the link between emotion dysregulation and mental health. NED was not associated with dysregulation, acting experience, or mental health. Greater challenges with mental health among students with more acting experience may be a result of individual differences in characteristics, such as neuroticism, emotional reactivity, or openness to reporting on mental health symptoms. Further research should explore this association accounting for these variables, and longitudinal work examining the impact of acting training on emotional and psychological health is needed.
Recommended Citation
Chernikova, Michelle and Santacrose, Diana, "Examining the relationships between emotion regulation, emotion differentiation, and mental health symptomatology: Does acting experience matter?" (2022). Honors Thesis. 550.
https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/honors-thesis/550
