(Excerpt from a Study)
[…] Our interest in the psychology of emotions led us to undertake an analysis of the creative legacy of K.S. Stanislavski. The result of this analysis was the essay “The Method of K.S. Stanislavski and the Physiology of Emotions,” written between 1955-1956 and published by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1962. I am grateful to the first reader and critic of the manuscript, Leon Abgarovich Orbeli.
In 1960, after transferring to the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, I had the opportunity to conduct experiments in close scientific collaboration with Pyotr Mikhailovich Ershov, a theater director and teacher. I began a systematic study of the involuntary and electrophysiological changes in actors during the voluntary production of various emotional states.
Here, we were relatively quickly convinced that the success of such studies depended on the lack of any developed, systematic, and well-founded general theoretical framework for human and higher mammal emotions. […]
