Why Your Most Important Relationship Is With Your Inner Voice

James Melaugh/The Observer

As Ethan Kross, an American experimental psychologist and neuroscientist, will cheerfully testify, the person who doesn’t sometimes find themselves listening to an unhelpful voice in their head probably doesn’t exist. Ten years ago, Kross found himself sitting up late at night with a baseball bat in his hand, waiting for an imaginary assailant he was convinced was about to break into his house.

A figure conjured by his frantic mind after he received a threatening letter from a stranger who’d seen him on TV. Kross, whose area of research is the science of introspection, knew that he was overreacting; that he had fallen victim to what he calls “chatter”. But telling himself this did no good at all.

At the peak of his anxiety, his negative thoughts running wildly on a loop, he found himself, somewhat comically, Googling “bodyguards for academics”.Kross runs the wonderfully named Emotion and Self Control Lab at Michigan University, an institution he founded and where he has devoted the greater part of his career ….Continue reading…

By: Rachel Cooke

Source: Why your most important relationship is with your inner voice | Psychology | The Guardian

Critics:

Various types of intrapersonal communication are distinguished in the academic literature. The term is often used in a very wide sense and includes many phenomena. A central contrast is based on whether the exchange happens purely internally or is mediated through external means. The internal type is the most discussed form. It plays out in the mind of one person without externally expressing the message.

It includes mental processes like thinking, meditating, and reflecting. However, there are also external forms of intrapersonal communication, like talking aloud to oneself in the form of private speech. Other examples are notetaking at school, writing a diary, preparing a shopping list, praying, or reciting a poem. External intrapersonal communication is also characterized by the fact that the sender and the receiver is the same person.

The difference is that an external medium is used to express the message. Another distinction focuses on the role of language. Most discussions in the academic literature are concerned with verbal intrapersonal communication, like self-talk and inner dialogue. Its hallmark is that messages are expressed using a symbolic coding system in the form of a language. They contrast with non-verbal forms like some forms of imagination, visualization, or memory.

In this regard, intrapersonal communication can be used, for example, to explore how a piece of music would sound or how a painting should be continued. Among the inner verbal forms of intrapersonal communication, an often-discussed contrast is between self-talk and inner dialogue. In the case of inner dialogue, two or more positions are considered and the exchange takes place by contrasting them. It usually happens in the form of different voices taking turns in arguing for their position.

This can be conceptualized in analogy to interpersonal communication as an exchange of different subjects, selves, or I-positions within the same person. For example, when facing a difficult decision, one part of a person may argue in favor of one option while another part prefers a different option. Inner dialogue can also take the form of an exchange with an imagined partner. This is the case when anticipating a discussion with one’s spouse or during imaginary conversations with celebrities or lost relatives.

For self-talk or inner monologue, on the other hand, there is no split between different positions. It is speech directed at oneself, as when commenting on one’s performance or telling oneself to “try again”. Self-talk can be positive or negative depending on how the person evaluates themself. For example, after having failed an exam, a student may engage in negative self-talk by saying “I’m so stupid” or in positive self-talk, like “don’t worry” or “I’ll do better next time”.

There are many differences between self-talk and inner dialogue. Inner dialogue is usually more complex. It can be used to simulate social situations and examine a topic from different angles. Its goal is frequently to explore the differences between conflicting points of view, to make sense of strange positions, and to integrate different perspectives. It also plays a central role in identity construction and self-organization. One function of self-talk is self-regulation.

Other functions include self-distancing, motivation, self-evaluation, and reflection. Self-talk often happens in reaction to or anticipation of certain situations. It can help the agent prepare an appropriate response. It may also be used to regulate emotions and cope with unpleasant experiences as well as monitor oneself. Self-talk and inner dialogue are distinct phenomena but one can quickly turn into the other. For example, an intrapersonal communication may start as self-talk and then evolve into inner dialogue as more positions are considered.

Intrapersonal communication is linked to a great range of phenomena. They include planning, problem-solving, and internal conflict resolution, as well as judgments about oneself and other people. Other forms are perception and understanding as well as conceptualization and interpretation of environmental cues. Further phenomena are data processing like drawing inferences, thinking, and self-persuasion as well as memory, introspection, dreaming, imagining, and feeling.

Various models of communication have been proposed. They aim to provide a simplified overview of the process of communication by showing what its main components are and how they interact. Most of them focus primarily on interpersonal communication but some are specifically formulated with intrapersonal communication in mind. According to the model proposed by Barker and Wiseman in 1966, intrapersonal communication starts with the reception of external and internal stimuli carrying information.

External stimuli belong to the senses and usually provide information about the environment. Internal stimuli include a wide range of impressions, both concerning the state of the body, like pain, but also encompassing feelings. In the Barker-Wiseman model, an early step of intrapersonal communication focuses on classifying these stimuli. In this process, many of the weaker stimuli are filtered out before reaching a conscious level. But they may still affect communication despite this.

A similar process groups the remaining stimuli according to their urgency. It runs in parallel with attempts to attach symbolic meaning to the stimuli as a form of decoding. How these processes take place is influenced by factors like the communicator’s social background and current environment. After the symbolic decoding process, ideation occurs in the form of thinking, organizing information, planning, and proposing messages.

As a last step, the thus conceived ideas are encoded into a symbolic form and expressed using words, gestures, or movements. This process can happen right after the ideation or with some delay. It results in the generation and transmission of more stimuli, either purely internal or also external. The generated stimuli work as a feedback loop leading back to their reception and interpretation. In this sense, the same person is both the sender and the receiver of the messages.

The feedback makes it possible for the communicator to monitor and correct messages. Both intrapersonal and interpersonal communication involve the exchange of messages. For interpersonal communication, the sender and the receiver are distinct persons, like when talking to a friend on the phone. For intrapersonal communication, one and the same person occupies both of these roles. Despite this difference, the two are closely related.

For example, some theorists, like Linda Costigan Lederman, conceptualize inner dialogue in analogy to social interaction as an exchange between different parts of the self. The two phenomena also influence each other in various ways. For example, the positive and negative feedback a person receives from other people shapes their self-concept or how they see themselves.

This in turn has implications for how they talk to themselves in the form of positive or negative self-talk. But the converse is also true: how a person talks to themselves affects how they interact with other people.One reason for this is that some form of inner dialog is usually involved when talking to others to interpret what they say and to determine what one wants to communicate to them. For example, if a person’s intrapersonal communication is characterized by self-criticism, this may make it hard for them to accept praise from other people.

On a more basic level, it can affect how messages from other people are interpreted. For example, an overly self-critical person may interpret an honest compliment as a form of sarcasm. However, self-talk may also interfere with the ability to listen. For example, when a person has an important meeting later today, their thoughts may be racing around this topic, making the person less responsive to interactions in the present.

In some cases, the listener is very keen on making a response. This may cause their attention to focus mainly on their self-talk formulating a message. As a result, they may miss important aspects of what the current speaker is saying. Positive and effective self-talk, on the other hand, tends to make people better at communicating with others. One way to become better at interpersonal communication is to become aware of this self-talk and to be able to balance it with the need of listening.

Another discussion in the academic literature is about the question of whether intrapersonal communication is in some sense more basic than interpersonal communication. This is based on the idea that some form of intrapersonal communication is necessary for and accompanies interpersonal communication.

For example, when a person receives a message from a friend inviting them to their favorite restaurant, there are often various internal reactions to this message before sending an answer in return. These reactions include sights and scents, memories from previous visits, checking whether this would clash with other plans, and devising a route to get to the restaurant.

These reactions are forms of intrapersonal communication. Other examples include self-talk in an attempt to evaluate the positions expressed by the speaker to assess whether one agrees or disagrees with them. But intrapersonal communication can also occur by itself without another party being involved.

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