Actors’ Behaviour in Stressful Situations: The Experience of Psychological Research

Abstract

Background. The personality of the actor, according to various studies, is characterized by increased sensitivity and receptivity, emotional mobility, openness, rich imagination. At the same time, the profession of an actor is associated with a large number of stressful situations related to the instability of professional employment and income, high competition, actors' sensitivity to situations of uncertainty. Taken together, this determines the need to study coping strategies and behaviour of actors in stressful situations Objective. The study focuses on the identification of interrelationships between personality characteristics, coping strategies and reactions to frustration in representatives of the acting profession. Study Participants. The study involved 27 theater and film actors (18 women, 11 men), aged 22 to 57 years. The length of service in the profession ranged from 1 to 35 years. Methods. Techniques of psychodiagnostics were used in the study, including Kettell 16 PF questionnaire, Folkman and Lazarus coping strategies questionnaire adapted by T.L. Kryukova, “Frustration Reactions Test” by S. Rosenzweig. On the basis of correlation analysis, the interrelations of personal characteristics, coping strategies used by respondents and types of behaviour in frustrating situations were revealed. Results. Correlations of types of behaviour in frustrating situations and coping strategies with communicative and emotional properties of personality, as well as with anxiety were revealed. It is shown that emotional sensitivity is positively related to extrapunitive direction of reactions to frustration (r = 0.42, p = 0.05) and negatively related to turning to others to solve the problem (r = –0.53, p = 0.01). The characteristic of “suspiciousness”, peculiar to the study sample, is negatively associated with aggressive self-protective type of stress behaviour (r = –0.47, p = 0.05). Conclusions. The analysis of the set of obtained correlations revealed that specific personality traits: high emotional sensitivity and suspiciousness, determine the actors' behaviour in stress mainly as fixation on the obstacle. Comparison of the results obtained in the study with the data of similar works of previous years allowed to fix the special role of the complex of personality characteristics “suspiciousness” in the context of reactions to stressful situations. The theme of difference in the actors' management of their emotional state in situations of professional activity and everyday life is outlined.

Keywords

• actor
• personality characteristics
• stress
• coping strategies
• reaction to stress
• frustration