Awareness and Regulation of Emotions: an Issue for Motor Learning Circassian?

In circus arts practice, it seems that emotions play an important role in the motor learning process. The emotional states, which are variable during this learning process, seem to be largely unconscious (Damasio, 1999). We assume that the awareness of lived emotions could be useful to the artist to better understand the basis of his learning. A search of five circus artists from the National Center for Circus Arts (CNAC) is conducted. We focus on two main components of emotions: the expressivo-behavioral dimension and the subjective feeling (Carton, 2007). To apprehend them, we rely on a work of observation of body expressions with the help of a camera as well as on interviews of auto-confrontation. Allowed by these, the verbalisation of circus informs us about their subjective emotional experience and can allow a work of "awareness" of emotions and automatic and uncontrolled actions. The analysis of the verbatim testifies in particular of the interest of interviews of autoconfrontation to allow the artists to regulate their emotions and their behaviors for purposes of learning.