Inner speech

Neuropsychotherapist.com2

inner speech a window into consciousness

Alain Morin & Bob Uttl

Inner speech represents a running commentary on any significant aspects of ourselves and our world. As such it “exteriorizes” consciousness, so to speak. While self-talk has been studied in specific situations such as self-regulation, and during distinct mental states like anxiety, very little

is known about naturally occurring inner speech in everyday life. Morin and colleagues (Morin et al., 2011; Uttl et al., 2012) have probed inner speech fre-quency and content in over 500 participants using self-report and thought sampling measures. Their findings show that inner speech is very often about the self and that a large portion is concerned with what others think of the self (e.g., self-evaluating, others’ opinion of the self, appearance, per-formance), as well as individuals and activities relevant to the self. In ad-dition, self-reported inner speech frequently serves self-regulatory (plan-ning), problem-solving, and mnemonic functions. In a thought sampling study using cell phones (Uttl et al., 2012), participants indicated talking to themselves over 50% of all prompt occasions; this is much higher than the 25% previously reported in another study (Heavey & Hurlburt, 2008). These results are discussed in terms of fit with the existing inner speech literature and key novelties are underlined.

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Inner Speech and ConsciousnessConsciousness, broadly defined, consists of one’s

ongoing experience of self and world, which includes sensations, perceptions, needs, goals, emotions, thoughts, memories, preferences, attitudes, inten-tions, etc., (Baars, 1988; Natsoulas, 1978). Because inner speech constitutes a running verbal commen-tary that often focuses on the content of one’s sub-jective experience (Morin, 2005), it represents an ideal window into consciousness. In this article we ask: What do people talk to themselves about, how often, and why? Answering these questions will at least partially open this window. Our preliminary results, discussed below, suggest that people can potentially talk to themselves about a large number of topics related to the self, others, and the environ-ment. This is consistent with the widespread idea that consciousness represents a very rich and com-plex experience (Morin, 2006).

Philosophers (e.g., Aristotle, Ryle) extensively wrote about inner speech (Blachowicz, 1997), but Russian psychologists (e.g., Luria, Vygotsky) were the first to empirically study its self-regulatory func-tion (Sokolov, 1972). Self-regulation involves altering one’s behavior, resisting temptation, changing one’s mood, selecting a response from various options, and filtering irrelevant information (Baumeister & Vohs, 2003). A broad definition of self-regulation includes setting goals, planning, problem-solving, decision-making, and self-motivating speech. Self-directed speech has been shown to be implicated in all aforementioned activities, and blocking the in-ner voice by asking participants to mentally count backward results in them engaging in more impul-sive behavior (Tullett & Inzlicht, 2010). Inner speech is also involved in all basic language functions such as reading, writing, and speaking (Abramson & Goldinger, 1997; Levine et al., 1982). Baddeley and Hitch (1974) focused on the memory function of in-ner speech—the “phonological loop” that gets ac-tivated when one rehearses material in short-term working memory, such as a phone number. More recently, psychologists have increasingly been ac-knowledging the role of inner speech in self-aware-ness (DeSouza et al., 2008; Edelman et al., 2011; Morin & Hamper, 2012; Neuman & Nave, 2010). Self-awareness is defined as the ability to become the object of one’s own attention; in that state one actively identifies, processes, and stores informa-tion about the self (Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Morin, 2011a). Although other mental and social factors underlie self-awareness (Morin, 2004), empirical evi-dence does support the idea of self-reflection often

being mediated by one’s inner voice (Morin, 2009; Schneider et al., 2005).

Note that ruminative and negative inner speech may be associated with diverse psychological disor-ders such as schizophrenia, social anxiety, and de-pression (Beazley et al., 2001; Fernyhough, 2004). Psychotherapeutic interventions have been de-signed to reduce or change dysfunctional self-talk (e.g., Meichenbaum, 1977).

Thought Sampling ResearchAdditional functions of inner speech have been

identified (see Morin, 2011b). It should be apparent by now that inner speech plays a central role in hu-man consciousness. A variety of measurement tech-niques exist to assess thought processes, including inner speech (see De Guerrero, 2005 & Table 1 for a summary).

Spontaneously occurring mental events in healthy individuals have been investigated using numerous variations of the thought sampling method. This method consists in sampling thinking in participants’ natural environments by using beepers that signal participants to report aspects of their experience at random intervals (Hulburt, 1997). To illustrate, Klinger and Cox (1987-88) relied on a questionnaire that participants were asked to fill in when being randomly beeped throughout the day. The ques-tionnaire assessed various characteristics of mental experiences such as the specificity, detail and color of visual experiences, as well as sense of control over these experiences and their time frame. Csikszent-mihalyi and Figurski (1982) also used the thought sampling method and identified the following key topics people in their sample thought about (from most to least frequent): work, time, chores, leisure, self, people, conversations, TV and radio, and food. Diehl and Hay (2007) asked participants to complete daily diaries over a 30-day period and to respond to a checklist of self-descriptors (e.g., agreeable, angry, energetic, insecure) in order to rate the emotional valence of their internal experiences. Among other things, their results showed that fluctuations in af-fect ratings tended to be related to the number of daily stressors reported by participants: on days with a larger number of stressful events, positive af-fect tended to decrease and negative affect tended to increase. Goldstein and Kenen (1988) invited vol-unteers to list their typical thoughts and found that 80% of respondents indicated making agreements with themselves; 44% of these thoughts were de-scribed as being a process of internal dialogue about lifestyle and health-related issues—i.e., smoking,

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Inner Speech: A Window into Consciousness

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drinking, working, interpersonal relations, reducing weight, and studying. These results illustrate the of-ten mentioned “dialogical” nature of inner speech (Fernyhough, 1996). Heavey and Hurlburt (2008) examined the frequency of common inner experi-ence phenomena by using a beeper that randomly cued participants to report whatever mental events they were experiencing at the moment of the probe. Their small sample (n = 30) of college students re-ported five basic types of inner experiences each occurring approximately 20% of the time: inner speech, mental imagery, thinking without symbols, feelings, and sensory awareness.

Our Thought Listing Study: FindingsThe thought sampling technique fits well for those

who want to capture all possible internal events that make up consciousness (e.g., images, sensations), as described above. However, if one aims at dissect-ing a specific aspect of conscious experience, such as

inner speech in our case, the thought listing proce-dure represents a better option1. With this method, volunteers are invited to retrospectively list as many thoughts that they can remember having experi-enced during a specific event.

In one study (Morin, et al. 2011) we employed an open-format thought listing method to measure in-ner speech in a sample of over 400 undergraduate students. Participants were invited to list what they typically say to themselves when using inner speech. The thought listing technique is usually used to as-sess inner speech occurrences in very specific situa-tions during a limited time period (Cacioppo & Petty ,1981)—e.g., immediately following a social interac-tion or contact with a feared stimulus, where inner speech content in socially anxious or phobic patients is compared to content generated by healthy partic-ipants. In contrast to this typical use of the thought-listing method, we wanted to sample participants’ naturally occurring inner speech. Thus, the novelty of our approach is that we asked participants to re-

1 The thought sampling approach can be used to uniquely assess inner speech, but instructions to participants must clearly specify to report one’s verbal thoughts as opposed to any other form of mental or bodily experience. See “A Cell Phone Study” section below.

Table 1. Representative measures of inner speech.Measure Description

Questionnaires Administering questionnaires made up of self-statements along a variety of domains (e.g., anxious versus non-anxious). Participants rate the frequency of their self-talk using a Likert-scale (e.g., from 0 “Never” to 5 “Very Often”).

Private speech Recordings of spontaneous speech-for-self emitted by children in social situa-tions.

Think out loud method Recordings of adults’ verbalizations as they are working on a given task; partici-pants are explicitly asked to verbalize their thoughts without censoring them.

Videotape reconstruc-tion procedure

“Reconstructing” thoughts that participants had during precise situations (e.g., task performance) by showing them video recordings of their behavior; partici-pants are asked to recall inner speech content as accurately as possible.

Thought listing Retrospectively listing as many thoughts as possible that occurred in specific situations.

Thought sampling Collecting a representative sample of participants’ mental experiences in natural settings. Subjects wear a beeper that produces audio signals at random intervals throughout the day. They are asked to report the content of their thoughts upon hearing the beep.

Articulatory suppres-sion(1)

Having participants complete a task while concurrently reciting verses or mentally counting backward from 100. The forced articulation produced by the recitation or counting blocks any other articulation that would be otherwise required when spontaneously engaging in inner speech.

Electromyographic recordings of tongue movements

Making electromyographic recordings of movements of the lips and tongue during problem-solving tasks. These movements represent an objective exter-nal expression of inner speech activity.

(1) Articulatory suppression does not assess inner speech per se but informs the researcher as to what types of cognitive work cannot be accomplished without it.



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port inner speech content as occurring in everyday life without situational or temporal restrictions. The goal was to obtain as ecological valid inner speech samples as possible.

We developed a coding scheme to classify and quantify inner speech data into specific content and function units. Our coding system includes the fol-lowing categories: (1) inner speech about the self, others, or unspecified (e.g., career, emotions, health); (2) inner speech about people (e.g., family, friends, community); (3) inner speech about the physical en-vironment (e.g., province/state, workplace, weath-er); (4) inner speech about activities (e.g., cooking, driving, leisure); (5) inner speech about events (e.g., at school, significant social events, future events); and (6) inner speech functions (e.g., planning tasks to do, remembering, self-censorship).

Table 2 presents the most frequently reported inner speech content and functions by participants. One general observation is that our participants mostly reported talking to themselves about them-selves. In decreasing order, the most frequently mentioned units were self-evaluation, emotions, physical appearance, relationships, problems, food, behavior, financial situation, stress, performance, future, education, beliefs, others’ opinion of self, and hypothetical situations. The least frequently reported inner speech units were dream contents, sexuality, personality traits, and death. In terms of inner speech functions, participants reported (in de-creasing order) talking to themselves to plan tasks, to remember, to self-motivate, to solve problems, to plan when to do specific tasks, to think, to rehearse upcoming conversations, to read, write or calcu-late, to study, to control emotions, to decide what to wear, to self-censor, and to replay past conversa-tions. The less frequently reported functions were praying, concentrating, rephrasing, and creativity. Regarding self-talk pertaining to participants’ so-cial environment, participants mostly reported (in decreasing importance) engaging in inner speech about family members, friends, people in general, their intimate partner, and children; larger social groups like one’s nation were rarely the focus on in-ner speech in our sample. In terms of activities, our participants often indicated talking to themselves about school, sports activities, work, leisure activi-ties, chores, music, and driving. Activities that were rarely mentioned were moving, alcohol and drug use, and dating. Our participants talked to themselves mostly about their immediate physical environment and not much about their town, neighbourhood or workplace. And finally, participants reported talking

Table 2. Most frequently self-reported inner speech content and functions.

Inner speech categories

Inner speech content

Self & others—general

• self-evaluation• emotions• physical appearance• relationships• problems• food• behavior• financial situation• stress• performance• future• education• beliefs• others’ opinion of self• hypothetical situations

Functions • to plan tasks• to remember• to self-motivate• to solve problems• to plan when to do specific tasks• to think• to rehearse upcoming conversa-tions• to read, write or calculate• to study• to control emotions• to determine what to wear• to self-censor• to replay past conversations

Social environment

• family members• friends• people in general• intimate partner• children

Activities • school & educational activities• sports activities• work• leisure activities• chores• music• driving

Physical environment

• immediate surroundings

Events • general daily events• future events• past events



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to themselves mostly about general daily events, fu-ture events, and past events.

Thought Listing Study: DiscussionParticipants in our sample mostly reported talk-

ing to themselves about themselves. This observa-tion is consistent with the proposed role played by inner speech in self-reflection (Morin & Hamper, 2012). Participants indicated talking to themselves about private self-aspects (e.g., emotions, beliefs) and public self-aspects (e.g., physical appearance, behavior), which reflects the classic distinction in-troduced by Fenigstein and colleagues (1975) be-tween private and public self-consciousness. Also, a significant proportion of inner speech was about what others think of the self (e.g., self-evaluating, others’ opinion of self, appearance): this echoes Mead’s view (1934) that the self at least partially de-fines itself by taking others’ perspective and imag-ining how one is perceived by others. Participants reported frequently engaging in self-talk about fu-ture events. A growing body of literature is currently examining mental time travel (MTT) (Quoidback et al., 2008; Szpunar, 2010). MTT involves mentally projecting oneself in a fictional future. Our results fit with those obtained by D’Argembeau et al. (2009), suggesting that at least some MTT is mediated by inner speech. Their study also showed that future-oriented thoughts often gravitated around leisure activities, work, errands, and relationships. The re-ported functions of future-oriented thoughts in the same study were planning, deciding, setting goals, and reassuring the self. These functions are consist-ent with inner speech functions reported by our par-ticipants.

Self-reported inner speech about people focused more on individuals that are close to oneself―family members, friends, intimate partner—and much less on distant and unknown others, such as the commu-nity and the world. It may be reasonable to assume that people are simply more interested in (and may talk to themselves more often about) any things directly relevant to themselves. In addition, par-ticipants in our sample talked to themselves mostly about their immediate physical environment as op-posed to more distant environmental themes such as one’s city, province, or nation. Again, this most likely reflects people’s natural inclination to think about things significant to the self. Participants indi-cated frequently talking to themselves about school and education, work, leisure activities, and chores. These represent typical activities most undergradu-ate students regularly engage in.

The most often self-reported inner speech func-tion was self-regulation, which includes planning to engage in specific tasks, self-motivating speech, self-censorship, time management, and planning when to do things. Also frequently mentioned was self-talk used to solve problems and make decisions, as well as inner speech used to remember things. These inner speech functions are precisely those that have been the most extensively investigated in the literature (e.g., Zivin, 1979).

A Cell Phone StudyThe thought listing approach described above

represents a nonreactive method which shows good criterion-related, concurrent, and discrimi-nant validity (Cacioppo et al., 1997). In other words, inner speech measured with the thought listing ap-proach correlates well with other measures of inner speech, does not correlate with measures unrelated to inner speech, and predicts actual behavior (e.g., emotional reaction to feared stimuli). However, be-cause of its retrospective and reconstructive nature, the thought-listing method may cause recall errors. Put simply, there is the possibility that participants may forget some actual inner speech occurrences

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or may “recall” instances that never occurred. The thought sampling approach discussed previously (see Footnote 1) is likely to take care of this limita-tion because it directly samples participants’ inner speech by randomly interrupting them during daily activities, thus producing more “natural” (ecologi-cally valid) content that does not rely on memory resources. Accordingly, in the next study, we (Uttl et al., 2012) used participants’ cell phones as a beeper device and asked them through text messaging to report their immediate inner speech content and current activity.

Participants were randomly sent eight prompts per day for seven days; each prompt asked them to report (1) whether they were talking to themselves or not, (2) (if yes) what they were talking to them-selves about, and (3) what activity they were en-gaged in. The coding scheme described previously was used to classify inner speech. The content and functions of inner speech that participants report-ed upon receipt of the text message prompts were comparable to what we obtained using the thought listing technique, suggesting that (1) a retrospec-tive self-report approach is valid and not overly con-taminated with recall biases, and (2) participants are able to report on their own inner speech use with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Our participants reported being engaged in the following activities (in decreasing order) when they received the text messages: watching TV, doing homework, talking to someone, eating, driving, relaxing, and surfing the internet or writing emails. Perhaps the most intriguing result we obtained was that participants reported talking to themselves well over 50 percent of all messages sent. This is much higher than the twenty-five percent previously reported by Heavey and Hurlburt (2008) in their small sample study of 30 participants. Our 160-participant sample allows for better generalization and suggests that people talk to themselves much more often that previously es-timated.

Future Research Questions and ConclusionWe hope that the data presented in this article

offer a glimpse into what consciousness is made up of when seen as a running verbal commentary on ourselves and our environment. To summarize, our work so far suggests that a substantial portion of consciousness is self-reflective—i.e., is about the person being conscious. Conscious experience is also largely about aspects of the world that are perti-nent to the self, including planning (self-regulating) events and behaviors.

Our previous studies inform us about normal, healthy consciousness in university students. What about older nonstudent individuals? What about ab-normal, unhealthy conscious experiences? What do anxious, depressed, or addicted individuals talk to themselves about? How does inner speech use cor-relate with various personality traits (e.g., Extrover-sion, Agreeableness) and cognitive operations (e.g., prospective memory, verbal knowledge)? Are there cultural differences in inner speech frequency, con-tent, and functions? These questions remain to be addressed, and their answers will further enhance our understanding of consciousness.

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Bob Uttl, Ph.D.

Dr. Bob Uttl has held academic posts in a several uni-versities and research institutes including National In-stitutes of Health, Bethesda, MD (USA), Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR (USA), University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba City (Japan), and Tamagawa University, Tokyo (Japan). Currently, he is Associate Professor of Psychol-ogy at Mount Royal University, Calgary, Canada. His research interests are broadly focused on cognition and cognitive aging. Topics of current and recent work in-clude the relation between perception, processing resources, and memory; changes in perception, processing resources, memory, and intelligence due to normal and pathological aging; prospective memory; inner speech; and measurement and research methods in psychology. Dr. Uttl has served as co-editor of Dynamic Cognitive Processes (2005) and Memory and Emotion (2006), co-authored over fifty scientific papers, and presented his research at numerous conferences worldwide.

Alain Morin, Ph.D.

Dr. Alain Morin got his Ph.D from Laval University in 1992. Be-tween 1991 and 2001 he taught various courses and conducted research in a host of Canadian universities and colleges in the Maritimes (e.g., St. Francis Xavier University, Acadia University) and Québec (e.g., Université de Montréal, CEGEP de Rivière-du-Loup). Now at Mount Royal University in Calgary, he teaches Theories of Personality, Social Cognition, and The Self. His field of expertise is self-awareness, more specifically: its cognitive un-derlying mechanisms with an emphasis on inner speech. Morin publishes scientific papers in journals such as Consciousness & Cognition, Cortex, Brain & Behavioral Sciences, Brain Research

Bulletin, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Journal of Mind and Behavior, and Science & Consciousness Re-view. His most recent contribution is a meta-analysis of brain-imaging studies using self-tasks in relation to left inferior frontal gyrus activation (the brain area that sustains inner speech). He also recently published a book chapter entitled “What are animals conscious of?” Morin is currently working on individual differences in in-ner speech, personality, psychopathology, and cognition. Other research interests include self-recognition, the localization of the self in the brain, the split-brain phenomenon, neurophilosophy, fame and self-destruction, and the antecedents of self-consciousness.

Education

Inner speech