Individual Differences in Frequency of Inner Speech: Differential Relations with Cognitive and Non-cognitive Factors

Abstract

Inner speech plays a crucial role in behavioral regulation and the use of inner speech is very common among adults. However, less is known about individual differences in the frequency of inner speech use and about the underlying processes that may explain why people exhibit individual differences in the frequency of inner speech use. This study was conducted to investigate how individual differences in the frequency of inner speech use are related to cognitive and non-cognitive factors. Four functions of inner speech including self-criticism, self-reinforcement, self-management, and social assessment measured by an adapted version of Brinthaupt's Self-Talk Scale were examined. The cognitive factors that were considered included executive functioning and complex reasoning and the non-cognitive factors consisted of trait anxiety and impulsivity. Data were collected from a large Chinese sample. Results revealed that anxiety and impulsivity were mainly related to the frequency of the affective function of inner speech (self-criticism and self-reinforcement) and executive functions and complex reasoning were mainly related to the frequency of the cognitive, self-regulatory function of inner speech (self-management).

Individual Differences in Self-Talk Frequency: Social Isolation and Cognitive Disruption

“…There are additional studies that are pertinent to the cognitive disruption hypothesis. Using a Chinese college student sample, Ren et al. (2016) found significant relationships between impulsivity and self-talk frequency.…”

“…Qualitative (open-ended) research on when, where, and why people talk to themselves supports the four STS subscales/functions (e.g., Morin et al., 2018). Finally, there is good cross-cultural support for the structure and properties of the STS (e.g., Khodayarifard et al., 2014; Ren et al., 2016).…”

“…Several researchers have studied individual differences in the frequency of intrapersonal communication (e.g., Honeycutt, 2010; Morin et al., 2011; Hurlburt et al., 2013; Ren et al., 2016). It is clear that people differ in how often they typically talk to themselves.…”

The Emergence of Inner Speech and Its Measurement in Atypically Developing Children

“…While questionnaires force participants to endorse pre-existing IS content, sampling methods require reporting specific aspects of inner experiences at random -as a reaction to an external signal, e.g., a beep. Importantly, the studies demonstrate a lot of variability in the amount and the quality of IS reported by participants (Ren et al, 2016). However, this may be due to the participants' reflection abilities rather than to individual variability in the amount of covert speech.…”

Elimination of bias in introspection: Methodological advances, refinements, and recommendations

“…In the field of first-person research, methods of introspection have been used for the investigation of various mental processes, such as imagining a circular object in one's mind (Ziegler & Weger, 2018a), of volitionally controlled perceptual reversals (Wagemann, Edelhäuser, & Weger, 2018), of recollection from memory , and of mind wandering . Furthermore, third-person research uses introspection for the investigation of the content of inner speech (Morin, Duhnych, & Racy, 2018), of the frequency of inner speech (Ren, Wang, & Jarrold, 2016), of the frequency of self-talk (Brinthaupt, Benson, Kang, & More, 2015), of the content of naturally occurring inner experience (e.g. Heavey & 9 Hurlburt, 2008), of the awareness of mind-wandering and mind-blanking (Bastian et al, 2017;Ward & Wegner, 2013), of the possibility of reporting phenomenal experience (Questienne et al, 2018), of experiences during meditation (Przyrembel & Singer, 2018), or of the ex post retrieval of the reasons for making a certain decision (e.g.…”