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.

Research on video games typically focuses on adolescents, young adults, and the possible negative effects of gaming. However, ever younger children are given access to video games, making research with these younger age groups necessary, particularly as games may start to replace activities such as pretend play. We investigated whether and how some video games for younger children may prime cognitive creativity, as well as how children conceptualize creativity within video games. In Study 1, children played one of two video games (Minecraft in creative mode, with no plot or mission, or Dragon Quest Builders, which contains both) and provided open-ended responses about their creativity in the game. Participants then completed a cognitive creativity task. In Study 2, video clips of children's Minecraft outputs from Study 1 were shown to a separate group of children, ages 7-15, online. Children rated the creativity of the Minecraft videos, explained their ratings, and reported their own video game experience. Results show children with more gaming experience rated gameplay creativity significantly lower than those with less experience, and gameplay focused on "building something" was rated significantly higher for creativity than other types of gameplay. These studies allow us to evaluate how video games could foster children's creative behaviors, to gather information on what children's creativity might look like in video games, and to understand how children of various ages conceptualize creativity within video games.

Opera and musical theatre are both complex artistic forms that feature similar components of narrative, performance, music, and movement. Despite these similarities, opera and musical theatre are often considered distinct in pedagogical, technical, and marketing perspectives. In psychological research on the arts and aesthetics, both opera and musical theatre performance are not only under studied, but have not been well theorized, either as distinct or linked art forms. Therefore, this paper presents an exploratory qualitative study of semi-structured interviews with six professional musical theatre and six professional opera performers with the aim of exploring the psychological outcomes different kinds of theatrical singers’ experience. Performers were asked how they approach and describe their craft and how they view the priority of different technical and psychological elements of their craft. Through a thematic analysis, two main themes emerged: Acting Habits of Mind (AHoM), and Artistic Boundaries between performer and character. While the extant AHoM Framework consists of eight different skills associated with learning to perform in straight (i.e., non-musical) theatre, both types of performers discussed using seven of the eight original AHoM, plus an additional emergent theme of “openness to continued learning” in their rehearsal and performance practices. Next, all performers discussed the importance of drawing on their own experiences while still holding emotional distance from characters they portray. The psychology underlying how musical theater and opera performers rehearse and perform may be more alike than different. Future research may thus consider these two contexts as psychologically similar, despite technical and genre-specific differences.

Children around the world naturally engage in creative behaviors and imaginative play. While empirical work has often conflated the two during development, there are several specificities that provide a rich picture of how various levels and types of creativity and imaginative engagement come online across maturation. Children develop better abilities to engage with counterfactual thinking, causal reasoning, and future thinking as they grow, while simultaneously developing various abilities in pretend play. Children’s creativity also develops from mini-c toward little-c creativity, and then toward larger and broader creative outputs. In combination, both creativity and imagination are more reality prone in childhood than previously proposed, and they likely intersect to help children develop. Taking into account a wide definition of creativity, this chapter proposes that one cannot exist without the other, and both develop simultaneously and naturally in the child, to be shaped, thwarted, and directed by culture and the child’s environment.

Understanding how individuals engage with narrative works they consider morally deviant and characters they consider morally "othered" is important to understand the boundaries of what people can or will moralize in their own imagination. We investigated this "imaginative resistance" (i.e., refusal or aversion to engage in a work that crosses a pre-established boundary) and had participants (N = 518) write both morally deviant and non-moral narratives. We then looked at associations among imaginative resistance, moral permissibility, religiosity, and modal possibility. Imaginative resistance was measured through participants' self-report of fulfilling writing prompts, ease of imagining, and independent coders' reports of prompt fulfillment. Participants displayed more imaginative resistance to a morally deviant than a non-moral prompt, though they tended to self-report more imaginative resistance to the deviant prompt than was actually shown through coding. General moral permissibility predicted self-reported ease of imagining. Religiosity did not predict self-report measures of imaginative resistance but did predict coded prompt-completion. Modal possibility did not predict either self-report or coded imaginative resistance. We argue for the necessity of observed measures of imaginative resistance as well as self-report measures to fully investigate this construct.

We present a systematic review covering the prevalence of research methodology published on psychology of the arts topics in the field's leading journal, Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (N = 612) over the lifespan on the journal (2006–2024) to exemplify the fields methodological orientation and point to the dearth of mixed methods studies. We suggest the field of psychology of the arts would benefit from expanding its methodological focus and argue for mixed methods as an advantageous approach. We base this argument on the inherent qualitative and quantitative qualities of art itself and the qualitative and quantitative nature of how humans experience art. Insight into how mixed methods may help the field of psychology of the arts overcome current issues is also offered. This includes a) contributing to a fuller understanding of art forms themselves and the psychological processes associated with the arts, b) remedying existing measurement issues, c) addressing common problems faced with longitudinal study in the field, d) addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion related issues in the field, and e) advancing the fields contributions to inference, insight, methodological transparency and reflexivity, dissemination, the potential for generalizability or transferability of findings, and practical utility of the research. Lastly, we discuss ongoing issues and considerations for employment of mixed methods especially for psychology of the arts topics. This is the first review to call attention to the field's methodological stance and to situate the unique merit of mixed methods for empirical study of the arts.

Theater is considered one of the creative arts, and participation has long been tied to such disparate outcomes as creative thinking, empathy, and emotional understanding. Yet research on what actually happens in a theater classroom from a psychological perspective has been lacking. In particular, how thinking strategies beyond improvisation, used in acting classes, may be tied to steps in the creative process has not been well specified theoretically or empirically. Here, I take under consideration established steps of the creative process, and how each could theoretically be linked to the acting habits of mind, eight dispositional-level mindsets foundational to acting classes. Theater classrooms are grounded in being embodied and contained spaces, critical to their success as creative laboratories for performance and student growth. However, questions remain about which students benefit from which types of theater activities, how to bring elements of theater's creativity into other domains and classrooms, and how to best help the transference of skills learned in the theater space to outside the theater space. This theoretical work sets up a path ahead for empirical investigations of how elements of acting classes, used iteratively and in concert with one another, can lead to promoting the creative process and creative thought.

The arts have been connected to well-being by scientists, philosophers, and laypeople for thousands of years. However, studies focused on childhood dance participation as conduits for well-being have received little attention. We examined the connections between dance participation and well-being in children aged 7-12 years old using open-ended questions given to children and parents (N = 65), and qualitative interviews conducted with teachers (N = 17). Data were thematically analyzed and coded for emergent themes using an emic phenomenological coding approach. Thematic findings suggest dance contributes to children's physical well-being and psychological well-being by acting as a platform for children to express themselves. Other emergent themes suggest dance participation contributes to well-being through promoting self-confidence, self-understanding, and positive identity development, particularly concerning children's understanding of their marginalized identities. Findings suggest areas for future study and have implications for parents, arts educators, and arts education policy.

The marching arts (MA) are an understudied art form involving both music and dance, which has been cited as an inclusive space for all, despite little to no work directly investigating racial-ethnic marching minority members' intergroup experiences. As such, the purpose of this study was to empirically assess racial minority members' intergroup experiences in the MA and if such experiences were related to their well-being. We conducted an online survey of 174 self-identified members of ethnic-racial minority groups in the United States who had participated in the MA. The sample was predominantly Black/African Americans (42%) and young adults (M-age = 27.54) with large numbers of Native American, Asian, and Hispanic members. Participants described their experiences of intergroup contact in the MA, feelings of belongingness, marching self-efficacy, and minority stress. When controlling for demographics and experience, we found positive intergroup contact is a more persistent predictor of stress, belongingness, and self-efficacy than negative contact. Despite positive contact being more persistent, negative contact is a significant moderator against the positive effects of positive contact, suggesting it can be particularly detrimental to the relationship between positive contact and well-being. These findings suggest MA activities may be viable avenues to explore arts engagement for people of color, and how intergroup contact symmetries and interactions of contact work in real-world contexts.

Social awareness and relationship skills are two essential components of children's socioemotional development that undergo rapid consolidation in middle childhood. Previous research has found that growing up in poverty can undermine the development of social awareness and relationship skills and has also suggested that theater education might serve as an important context in which these skills can develop. In the current study, we examined whether participation in a program of theater education was associated with higher levels of two key aspects of social awareness-empathy and perspective-taking-and openness to establishing relationships with their peers among a sample of children placed at risk by poverty. After participating in the program, children exhibited significantly higher scores on measures of empathy (B = .32, SE = .10), t(7.65) = 3.33, p = .011, and openness to establishing peer relationships (B = .77, SE = .23), t(5.05) = 3.29, p = .021, than their comparison group peers. Among a randomly selected subset of students from both the treatment and comparison groups, children in the treatment group exhibited larger gains in their perspective-taking than children in the comparison group. These results are interpreted considering previous research, and their implications for educational policy, especially as it relates to arts education for children in poverty, are discussed.

Artistic engagement and enjoyment are conceptualized as mechanisms for positively affecting well-being. However, less is known about how negative extramusical information influences enjoyment and/or engagement. We asked if knowing the immoral character of a composer and/or their compositional intent negatively affected listeners' engagement and enjoyment. Participants (N = 448) read a fictionalized excerpt about Holst's Mars, with either sexist or neutral composer information, and either sexist or neutral musical intent before listening to the work and completing measures of their enjoyment, engagement, and aesthetic response. We found an effect of extramusical information for listeners' enjoyment and aesthetic response, but not for engagement. Enjoyment and aesthetic response were higher in the Neutral Composer/Neutral Intent condition than the other three conditions. This study furthers understanding of how extra-musical factors affect the positive emotions music elicits, and impact how listeners interact with music, thus impacting possibilities for enhanced senses of well-being.

Dance is a multifaceted creative act that has been used to communicate emotions throughout human evolution. Despite this history, there has been no empirical exploration of components of dance that allow it to communicate emotion. We address this with a mixed methods study in which a quantitative study with dance viewers builds upon qualitative findings with dance artists. Qualitative analysis revealed proposed components of dance responsible for emotion communication are narrative content, social interaction, emotion portrayal intent, and textural quality of movement. These elements were then manipulated using dance video stimuli to quantitatively test viewers' emotion perception accuracy. Results revealed emotion portrayal intent (i.e., expression intent in dance creation) is an important factor for viewers to accurately perceive emotion, regardless of narrative content. While prior studies have focused on the perceiver's role in emotion perception from dance, this is the first study to demonstrate emotions are perceived from dance based on intent during dance creation. Findings highlight the nuanced structure of emotion communication in dance, for which we pose a theoretical framework. Together, dance holds possibilities for studying distinct mechanisms for creative communication that may be important for the study of generalized affect communication outside of creative arts contexts.

Understanding the impacts of digital media such as video games is critical for scholarship during the digital transformation. While the literature on the effects of video games continues to grow, there is little work on positive effects, including creativity, either as an outcome from or process within games. Video games are a media type that often requires creative problem-solving and multiple idea generation. Importantly, adequately theorizing, measuring, and assessing creativity as both an action within video games and a possible outcome of engaging with video games necessitates a detailed understanding of what video games are. Here we propose and outline a taxonomy of the various components within video games that could impact different aspects of creativity interventions and creative processes. We then break down those components, including genre, graphics, mechanics, instructions, incentive systems, and multiplayer functionality. We apply this taxonomy briefly in several games, and Minecraft and Baldur's Gate 3 are used in more depth to show how researchers can apply our proposed framework. Knowing which video game components affect which creativity outcomes can clarify our understanding of creativity and the creative process in a digital world, and identify how gameplay itself can be a creative artifact.

Abstract Encouraging children to engage their imagination and creativity plays a critical role in healthy cognitive, social, and emotional development. As such, questions about the influence of digital media use (“screen time”) on the development of imagination and creativity are critical. Findings to date regarding the impact of media exposure on creativity are mixed. Some studies suggest that decreases in creative thought and expression are related to the frequency of media exposure and having media in the foreground and background during play. However, others suggest that media content aiming to engage children’s imagination can promote creativity and abstract thinking, especially when engaging with characters that they love or want to be like.

Two studies examined the process and aftermath of coming to disbelieve in the myth of Santa Claus. In Study 1, 48 children ages 6 to 15 answered questions about how they discovered Santa was not real and how the discovery made them feel, and 44 of their parents shared their perspectives and how they promoted Santa. In Study 2, 383 adults reflected on their experiences shifting to disbelief in Santa Claus. In both studies, the average age of disbelief was around 8, but with significant variability. Most participants reported testimony from others contributed to their disbelief, and some reported skepticism as a result of either experience (e.g., observation) or logical reasoning. About a third of children and half of adults reported some negative emotions upon discovering the truth. Higher levels of parental Santa promotion were associated with experiencing some negative emotions upon discovering the truth in both studies. Additionally, adults who reported feeling only negative emotions tended to be older when they discovered the truth, more likely to have reported learning the truth abruptly, and more likely to have reported learning the truth through testimony. That said, experiences of negative emotions were generally short-lived, and the vast majority of both children and adults reported they would celebrate Santa with their own children or were already doing so. Implications of these findings for how to approach children’s transition to skepticism regarding Santa are discussed, including timing, the role of parents, and popular notions of discovery for children’s trust towards their parents.

The field of leader development has recently begun to focus more on the role of pre-adult leadership experiences in shaping leader development. However, research has largely neglected to account for children’s and adolescents’ agency in shaping their own leader development, instead focusing on external drivers of such development (e.g., parents, schools). This integrative conceptual article provides a model for leader development from childhood through adolescence, drawing on insights from the cognitive and social child development literature. This model focuses on the reciprocal influences of agency, early leadership experiences, and foundational socio-cognitive skills, including theory of mind, metacognition, self-regulation, and autobiographical reasoning, to foster growth and complexity in leadership skills and mindsets. In addition, the enabling forces that influence the early development and expression of agency, socio-cognitive skills, and leader mindsets are described.