ARTICLE 6

Bloch, S., Orthous, P & Santibáñez (1987). “Effector patterns of basic emotions: a psychophysiological method for training actors”. J. Social & Biological Structures, 10:1-19.

The Journal of Social and Biological Structures is an interdisciplinary journal published by Academic Press Inc. Limited (London). The article “Effector patterns of basic emotions”, without neither the commentaries nor the rejoinder, was reproduced in: Zarrilli, Phillip B., ed. Acting (Re) Considered: Theories and Practices. London: Routledge, 1994. (197-218), by permission of Jai Press Inc., and by the senior author.

The following article presents the early experiments with the method initiated with my colleagues at the Universidad de Chile, in Santiago 1971. They constitute the basis for the later development and creation of the Alba Emoting system.

It is interesting to know the early steps of the research and its first applications to the work with actors. These results were reported internationally about fifteen years later.

The publication attracted attention in the academic world mainly by those interested in the study of emotions, as it recorded for the first time the typical breathing patterns that distinguish among the six basic emotions. Moreover it established experimentally the possibility to generate those same emotions starting, from the specific respiratory actions.

Once the article was published in the interdisciplinary Journal of Social and Biological Structures, the editor asked for comments from different international personalities: an anthropologist, a psychiatrist, a neurophysiologist, a theatre director, a philosopher and a social scientist. The comments were published one year later, in 1988 in the same Journal.

As an Annex in this book. I enclose the commentary of Dr. Wolf Singer. From the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research (Frankfurt, Germany) .I include it  because I consider it relevant to the implications our experimental results have on  the understanding of brain functiomimg.