Matthew Berry

McMaster University | McMaster · Department of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behavior

Actors are required to engage in multimodal modulations of their body, face, and voice in order to create a holistic portrayal of a character during performance. We present here the first trimodal analysis, to our knowledge, of the process of character portrayal in professional actors. The actors portrayed a series of stock characters (e.g., king,...

Actors are required to engage in multimodal modulations of their body, face, and voice in order to create a holistic portrayal of a character during performance. We present here the first trimodal analysis of the process of character portrayal in professional actors. The actors portrayed a series of stock characters (e.g., king, bully) that were or...

Actors make modifications to their face, voice, and body in order to match standard gestural conceptions of the fictional characters they are portraying during stage performances. However, the gestural manifestations of acting have not been quantified experimentally, least of all in group-level analyses. In order to quantify the facial correlates o...

The current study set out to examine how the presence or absence of depicted characters in visual narratives influences the degree of character-related content in improvised stories. The experiment consisted of trials of oral storytelling that were prompted by wordless comics. The degree of character content in the storylines was varied from being...

During the process of acting, actors have to embody the characters that they are portraying by changing their vocal and gestural features to match standard conceptions of the characters. In this experimental study of acting, we had professional actors portray a series of stock characters (e.g., king, bully, lover), which were organized according to...

There is no established classification scheme for literary characters in narrative theory short of generic categories like protagonist vs. antagonist or round vs. flat. This is so despite the ubiquity of stock characters that recur across media, cultures, and historical time periods. We present here a proposal of a systematic psychological scheme f...