Our Guest today is Thalia Goldstein

https://www.thaliagoldstein.com/

Thalia is a former professional actress, dancer, and lifelong theatre nerd. She is currently an associate professor and director of the Applied Developmental Psychology program in the Department of Psychology at George Mason University, where she directs the Play, Learning, Arts and Youth Lab (PLAYlab), and codirects the National Endowment for the Arts Lab, the Mason Arts Research Center (MasonARC). With her students and colleagues, she has published more than 70 papers on the effects of pretend play, imagination, theatre, and other art forms on child and adolescent development. She earned her BA at Cornell University, her MA and PhD at Boston College, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University. Since 2017 she has been the coeditor of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, the Division 10 journal for the American Psychological Association, where she has also won several awards and was recently named fellow.

Our discussion mainly centered on the 8 acting habits of mind which she writes about in her book, Why Theatre Education Matters: The book is the first-of-its-kind, a nationally representative study of actual acting classes showing how the activities of acting are directly connected to critical 21st Century Skills such as collaboration , communication, creativity and emotional intelligence.

Her passion for research is contagious. We started off with her personal reason for becoming a scientist in the arts - a reason I think we all can resonate with. I know I certainly did.

The 8 Acting Habits of Mind