ABSTRACT

In the final chapter, we turn our attention away from individual psychologists and toward the process of psychological and personality testing and evaluation. As actors, we often make judgments about the personality characteristics of the characters we play. These judgments are generalizations that help us make choices within the framework of our performance. Psychology as a field has a similar area called personality testing, which helps classify people by making statistical (in most cases) generalizations very similar to what we do as actors except in the “real world.” Some of these tools from psychology can be useful for the actor’s self-evaluation, as well as in studying general personality traits that tend to be common. We also explore the concept of “madness” and genuine mental pathology for suggestions as to how we might play characters that are truly deranged in some way. We also draw conclusions about the overall book and how this work might be applied in a broad set of applications.