Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It

by Ethan Kross

Our theory wasn’t based only on my experience or the words of Malala, LeBron James, and others. Previous research had indicated that a high usage of first-person-singular pronouns, a phenomenon called I-talk, is a reliable marker of negative emotion. For example, one large study performed in six labs across two countries with close to five thousand participants revealed a robust positive link between I-talk and negative emotion. Another study showed that you can predict future occurrences of depression in people’s medical records by computing the amount of I-talk in their Facebook posts. All of which is to say, talking to oneself using first-person-singular pronouns like “I,” “me,” and “my” can be a form of linguistic immersion.

As we predicted, participants who used distanced self-talk reported that they experienced less shame and embarrassment after giving their speech compared with participants who used immersed self-talk. They also ruminated less about their performance afterward. In their descriptions of their mental experiences, instead of highlighting their nervousness or the difficulty of the task, they said that their inner voices focused on the fact that nothing of real consequence was actually at stake.

Remarkably, as we coded the videos and dug deeper into the data from the experiment, it wasn’t just the participants’ emotional responses that differed. Judges who watched videos of participant’s speeches indicated that people in the distanced self-talk group performed better on the task as well.