From our Bureau
During stressful times, talking to yourself in the third person—silently—could help you control your emotions.
This method doesn’t take any more mental effort, say researchers, than talking to yourself in the first person, which is how people normally talk to themselves.
The study in Scientific Reports indicates that such third-person self-talk may constitute a relatively effortless form of self-control.
The study involved two experiments that both significantly reinforced this main conclusion.
In one experiment, at Moser’s Clinical Psychophysiology Lab, participants viewed neutral and disturbing images and reacted to the images in both the first and third person while an electroencephalograph monitored their brain. When reacting to the disturbing photos (such as a man holding a gun to their heads), participants’ emotional brain activity decreased very quickly (within 1 second) when they referred to themselves in the third person.
The researchers also measured participants’ effort-related brain activity and found that using the third person took no more effort than using first person self-talk. This bodes well for using third-person self-talk as an on-the-spot strategy for regulating emotions, Moser says, as many other forms of emotion regulation, such as mindfulness and thinking on the bright side, require considerable thought and effort.
In the other experiment, which University of Michigan psychology professor Ethan Kross led, participants reflected on painful experiences from their past using first and third person language while their brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or FMRI.
Similar to the first study, participants’ displayed less activity in a brain region that is commonly implicated in reflecting on painful emotional experiences when using third person self-talk, suggesting better emotional regulation. Further, third person self-talk required no more effort-related brain activity than using first person.
“What’s really exciting here,” says Kross, who directs the Emotion and Self-Control Lab, “is that the brain data from these two complimentary experiments suggest that third-person self-talk may constitute a relatively effortless form of emotion regulation”.
