Self-Talk (Self-Distancing)

Historical Background

Kross and Ayduk (2017) noted several years ago that several studies showed that reflecting on one's emotions after a distressing event could be helpful, while other studies showed that such reflection could be unhelpful, resulting in "a vicious cycle of rumination" that exacerbated distress and negatively impacted people's health and well-being. These authors postulated that the benefit of reflecting on past events depended on the perspective one took. Adaptive reflection, they believed, involved self-distancing, or "taking a step back" from one's experience. (Aaron Beck and others had previously discussed the benefit of self-distancing.) 

Kross and Ayduk (2017) conducted numerous experiments in which they had participants reflect on a negative past experiences from either a self-immersed or self-distanced perspective. (The former participants were told to go back and experience the event unfolding "through your own eyes as if it were happening to you all over again," while the latter participants were told to "take a few steps back" and "watch the event unfold from a distance and see yourself in the event.") In study after study, these researchers found that self-distancing yielded many benefits -- e.g., causing participants to reexperience fewer negative emotions, focus more on restructuring past negative in insightful and constructive ways, engage in less aggressive behavior, and display less cardiovascular reactivity when remembering the negative event. These results were found to be equally true among children, individuals with depressive symptoms, and individuals with bipolar disorder.

Self-Talk (1 of 2)

More recent research has shown the benefits of self-distancing can be achieved through self-talk. Kross et al. (2014) conducted two studies showing that referring to oneself in the second- and third-person promotes self-distancing. Why this is the case shouldn't be surprising, as people generally use non-first-person pronounces when referring to others; thus, using such pronouns to refer to oneself can be expected to "enhance self-distancing by leading people to think about themselves as though they were someone else." 

Kross et al. (2014) conducted two additional studies showing that self-distancing enhances people's ability to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in socially stressful situations. In the first study, participants were "told that they would be asked to make a positive first impression on another person." Half of the participants were then asked to spend 3 minutes reflecting on their thoughts and feelings using first-person pronouns while the other half were asked to reflect on their thoughts and feelings using non-first-person pronouns. In the end, judges determined that participants in the latter group were "less nervous during the interaction and performed better than their first-person counter-parts." 

In the second study, experimenters induced social stress by using the Trier Social Stress Task, which asks participants to "deliver a public speech in front of an evaluative audience without receiving sufficient time to prepare." Before giving the speech, half of the participants were asked to reflect on their thoughts and feelings about the upcoming speech using first-person pronouns while the other half were asked to engage in this reflection using non-first-person pronouns. In the end, participants who used non-first-person pronouns "performed better on the speech task, experienced less global negative affect and shame after delivering their speech, and engaged in less postevent processing."

NPR:

Kross says that people who used "I" had a mental monologue that sounded something like, "'Oh, my god, how am I going do this? I can't prepare a speech in five minutes without notes. It takes days for me to prepare a speech!'" 

People who used their own names, on the other hand, were more likely to give themselves support and advice, saying things like, "Ethan, you can do this. You've given a ton of speeches before." These people sounded more rational, and less emotional — perhaps because they were able to get some distance from themselves.

Kross et al. (2014) found in additional studies that participants who used non-first-person pronouns appraised "social-anxiety-provoking events in more challenging and less threatening terms" and that "the self-regulatory effects of this process extend to people regardless of their dispositional vulnerability to social anxiety." 

Subsequent studies confirmed that self-distancing self-talk enhanced people's ability to regulate their emotions (Moser et al., 2017; Nook et al., 2017; Streamer et al., 2017). Grossmann & Kross (2014) found that thinking about an anxiety-provoking situation in third-person pronouns results in "wiser reasoning (i.e., recognizing the limits of their knowledge and the importance of compromise and future change, considering other people’s perspectives)." 

Kross et al. (2017) extended this research to discover whether third-person self-talk "is effective for helping people cope with acute stressors in vivo." They asked 1000 participants to rate how worried they were about a recent Ebola outbreak. Participants were then asked to "take a few minutes to think and write about your deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding Ebola." The first group was asked t do this using first-person pronouns and the second group using one's name and third person pronouns like he or she. Those who wrote about Ebola more using third-person language were more likely to "generate fact-based reasons not to worry about Ebola."

Self-Talk (1 of 2)

Kross and Ayduk (2017) summarize more recent research showing the efficacy of self-distancing self-talk:

• Dolcos and Albarracin (2014) recently demonstrated over a series of studies that cueing people to address themselves with the word you led them to perform better on a demanding task (i.e., solving difficult anagrams) and enhanced their intentions to per-form well compared to participants who were cued to address themselves using the word I. 
• White and Carlson (2016) found that 5-year-old children who used their names to reflect on the self outperformed children who used I on an executive functioning task (a seven-level card-sorting task designed for 2–7-year-olds). Interestingly, 3-year-olds did not benefit from this manipulation, a finding that the authors interpreted as suggesting that a certain level of theory of mind may be needed for these manipulations to be effective.

White et al. (2017) had 4- and 6-year-old children work on a deliberately boring computer task. After several minutes, the children were given a break, and each of the three conditions were then given different instructions. The first condition was told to answer the question, "Am I working hard?" The second group, "Is [insert name] working hard?" The third group were asked to imagine that they were Batman or another character good at work hard and to they answer the question, "Is Batman [or other character] working hard?" The children who took the perspective of another person spent the most time working, followed by the children who used the third-person perspective. 

Grenell et al. (2019) further explored the effect of self-distancing among children and asked a group of 4- and 6-year-olds to perform a frustrating task. They found that children with lower executive function and effortful control benefited the most from self-distancing. 

More Applications

Ayduk, Mischel, & Kross (2015):

Nobel Prize–winner Malala Yousafzai demonstrated the use of the latter approach when she was asked by Jon Stewart how she felt upon finding out that she was on a Taliban hit list. She was fearful, but then she imagined how she’d respond if she was attacked: “I said, ‘If he comes, what would you do, Malala?’ … Then I would reply [to] myself, ‘Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.’”

Christopher Bergland:

More specifically, instead of psyching myself out by having a defeatist first person monologue such as: "There's no way I can make it to the finish line. My body is overheating and the soles of my feet are on fire. I can't take it anymore. I have to stop." I would flip the script of my silent inner dialogue and talk to myself (like a broken record) in a bold, third-person coaching voice: "You can do this, Chris!! You've lived through other painful experiences in your life, you'll live through this. Don't give up now. Dammit! You have to keep going. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and acting like a wimp. Move it!"

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Ayduk, O., Mischel, W., & Kross, E. (2015). Pronouns Matter when Psyching Yourself Up. Harvard Business Review.

Grenell, A., Prager, E. O., Schaefer, C., Kross, E., Duckworth, A. L., & Carlson, S. M. (2019). Individual differences in the effectiveness of self‐distancing for young children's emotion regulation. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 37(1), 84-100.

Grossmann, I., & Kross, E. (2014). Exploring Solomon’s paradox: Self-distancing eliminates the self-other asymmetry in wise reasoning about close relationships in younger and older adults. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1571–1580.

Kross, E., & Ayduk, O. (2017). Self-distancing: Theory, research, and current directions. In Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 55, pp. 81-136). Academic Press.

Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., ... & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of personality and social psychology, 106(2), 304.

Kross, E., Vickers, B. D., Orvell, A., Gainsburg, I., Moran, T. P., Boyer, M., ... & Ayduk, O. (2017). Third‐Person Self‐Talk Reduces Ebola Worry and Risk Perception by Enhancing Rational Thinking. Applied Psychology: Health and Well‐Being, 9(3), 387-409.

Moser, J.S., Dougherty, A., Mattson, W.I., Katz, B., Moran, T.P., Guevarra, D., et al. (2017). Third-person self-talk facilitates emotion regulation without engaging cognitive control: Converging evidence from ERP and fMRI. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 4519. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-04047-3.

Nook, E.C., Schleider, J.L., & Somerville, L.H. (2017). A linguistic signature of psychological distancing in emotion regulation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(3), 337–346.

Streamer, L., Seery, M.D., Kondrack, C.L., Lamarche, V.M., & Saltsman, T.L. (2017). Not I, but she: The beneficial effects of self-distancing on challenge/threat cardiovascular responses. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 70, 235–241.

White, R. E., Prager, E. O., Schaefer, C., Kross, E., Duckworth, A. L., & Carlson, S. M. (2017). The “Batman Effect”: Improving perseverance in young children. Child development, 88(5), 1563-1571.