ABSTRACT
While the dramaturgical metaphor has become a commonplace among social scientists, rather little is known about the psychological processes that underlie the dramatic experience in the theater. This paper sketches a few of the problems that a psychology of the drama must address. (1) Some grow out of the fact that while drama is necessarily based on pretense, it nevertheless can move us very deeply. The paper argues that the emotion felt by the audience (or by the actor who portrays it) has an as-if character whose quality may be derived by cognitive reinterpretations similar to those which Schachter and Singer proposed to explain “real” emotions. This as-if character can become very complex, for the cognitive context can become embedded in a further cognitive frame, of which the play-within-a play is an example. (2) Other issues derive from the fact that the drama is a temporal art form which trades on the arousal and betrayal of expectations. The paper describes some attempts to study possible precursors of the dramatic experience by looking at expectations about inanimate events in adults and the enjoyment of the peak-a-boo game in infants. (3) The paper ends with a classical problem, the enjoyment of tragedy, and discusses several interpretations of this phenomenon.
