Coping strategies in acting students

Abstract

The acting profession is stressful due to high emotional costs associated with actor transformations for role. The stress is aggravated by such modern factors as profesof studying and developing stress resistance in today’s acting students. Our study involved 163 respondents: acting students of the Institute of Contemporary Art (Moscow, 2 nd –3 rd years of study, N = 76), Russian Institute of Theatre Arts (Moscow, 4 th year of study, N = 67) and Ivanovo Vocational School of Culture (Ivanovo, 2 nd year of study, N = 20). The methods included the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) by R.B. Cattell and the Ways of Coping Questionnaire by R. Lazarus and S. Folkman adapted by T.L. Kryukova. Correlation analysis was used as the main method of data analysis. The results confirm the findings of numerous earlier works that established such personality traits of actors as pronounced courage, enterprise, readiness to take risks and cooperate with people, sensitivity, artistic expression, emotionality, and artistic perception of the world. It was also found that ‘escape-avoidance’ is the most pronounced strategy of coping with stress in acting students — it is manifested in denial and evasion of the problem. The correlation analysis showed that the choice of certain coping strategies by acting students is largely associated with their emotional stability. Acting students with high emotional stability are less likely to use coping strategies aimed at stabilizing the emotional state, and more likely, the strategies aimed at solving the problem, while the opposite is true for acting students with low emotional stability. The study of stress in students of acting programs has direct practical significance for improving the quality of education, professionalism and psychological well-being in the creative sphere.