Why talking about yourself in the third person could help control your emotions
Andy Henion, Postdoctoral Researcher, Michigan State University. 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. Say a man named John is upset about recently being dumped. By simply reflecting on his feelings in the third person (“Why is John upset?”), John is less emotionally reactive than when he addresses himself in the first person (“Why am I upset?”). “Essentially, we think referring to yourself in the third person leads people to think about themselves more similar to how they think about others, and you can see evidence for this in the brain,” says Jason Moser, associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “That helps people gain a tiny bit of psychological distance from their experiences, which can often be useful for regulating emotions.” 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 […]