Speaking of Psychology - Inner Monologues with Ethan Kross, PhD

Episode Date: March 25, 2020

You may have heard about the internet debate on inner monologues recently. It all started from a tweet that went viral. That tweet said that some people have an internal narrative, and some don’t. What ensued were thousands of comments, retweets and news stories on the topic. Turns out that people have a lot to say about their inner voices. According to our guest for this episode, University of Michigan psychology professor Dr. Ethan Kross, it’s not exactly that simple. He says every healthy person has an inner voice, but how it manifests can vary dramatically from person to person. Find more on Kross’ work here: http://selfcontrol.psych.lsa.umich.edu Join us online August 6-8 for APA 2020 Virtual.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stop what you're doing. Quick, recall your childhood phone number. Done? Okay, so did you say the numbers inside your head? Did the phone number appear as an image? Something else? You may be wondering why I'm asking you this seemingly off-the-wall question. Well, it's because I'm trying to get you to analyze your inner voice. You may have heard about the internet debate recently on inner monologues. It all started from a tweet that went viral. That tweet said that some people have an internal narrative, and some don't. What ensued were thousands of comments, retweets, and news stories on the topic. Turns out that people have a lot to say about their inner voices. Some people were shocked to learn that there are those who have a running commentary in their heads all the time, while others

don't have a permanent live-in narrator. According to our guest for this episode, University of Michigan psychology professor Dr. Ethan Cross, it's not exactly that simple. He says every healthy person has an inner voice, but how it manifests can vary dramatically from person to person. Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a bi-weekly podcast from the American Psychological Association that explores the connections between psychological science and everyday life. I'm your host, Caitlin Luna. Dr. Cross is joining us via Skype from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Welcome, Dr. Cross. Thanks for having me.

First, I want to establish one at inner monologue or inner voice is. How do you describe it? So I think of the inner voice as silent verbal processing. So the example you gave to begin the podcast was a really good one. So if I asked you to silently repeat a phone number in your head, that would be you activating your inner voice, so to speak, at a very basic level. So you're using verbal reasoning skills to play with information. And there are, of course, all sorts of ways that we can use internal silent language to help navigate our lives. So we can and often do use that verbal reasoning to keep information in mind, like when we rehearse a phone number or when we might silently rehearse what we're going to say in a given context.

So if I'm preparing for presentation, I might repeat something over and over, how I'm going to open the talk. But we also use language, silent language, the inner voice, so to speak, to do lots of other things, to imagine how we might respond. to different situations in our future. Some people report having conversations with themselves silently. Like you might see, you know, often popularizing movies, oh, my God, what am I going to do? If this happens, well, if this happens, I'll do that. And so the inner voice can take on lots of different roles, depending on the different context we find ourselves in.

So how can those inner voices vary from person to person? As you said, every healthy person has an inner voice, but just how it appears is different. Yeah, so that's a great question. I think, you know, going back to the tweet, the different reactions that people had, what was so interesting to me about those with some people saying, oh, I never talk to myself. I don't have an inner voice. And other people saying, oh, I talk to myself all the time. I'm always engaged in some kind of inner monologue. I think part of the issue there is that people have different conceptions of what the inner voice actually is. So in my mind, the inner voice covers all. the terrain we just discussed, ranging from activities where you are silently rehearsing what you're trying to memorize or say. That's one manifestation of the inner voice. But another manifestation at the other end of the spectrum might be something like internal rumination where we're engaged, oh my God, what should I do? How is this going to happen? What if this happens? What if the carotavirus affects my family to use a current event? That's a different manifestation of the inner voice. And I do

think it is the case that some people engage in that kind of inner rumination a lot more than other people. Some people report not ruminating at all about things. And if you are equating the inner voice with a kind of ruminative thought process, then yeah, there's going to be huge variability in the degree to which people engage it. But if you go to the other end of the spectrum and look at the basic functions that the inner voice serves when it comes to memorizing information, keeping information active in your mind, then I think it is a universal that characterizes all quote unquote normal, healthy functioning individuals. So what are your thoughts about how this discussion just, you know, exploded on the internet?

Are you surprised by that or, you know, what are your thoughts? I think it's fascinating. I think the inner voice is such an interesting topic because I think it is very salient to so many people. But it's an incredibly private experience. So many people spend a lot of time in their heads. By some estimates, we spend most of our waking hours thinking and verbally reflecting on our lives internally. And so it's something that many people are doing so frequently, but they're not necessarily talking about it with others. It's not as though I go meet some friends for coffee.

Hey, guess what I was just talking to myself about. And so it's this, it's very, very common, intimate experience we have, yet we don't talk about it very much. And when you look at the science, it's often coded with jargon, working memory, the phonological loop, which is the technical term that describes the component of working memory that is verbal, linguistic in nature. Right. Really complicated, jargon-filled scientific terms. And so I think once there was an opportunity to have a public conversation about this topic, many people were excited to participate. And they were particularly excited to participate when something somewhat counterintuitive was raised, the idea that some people don't have an internal monologue. Yeah, I think it just brings up that, you know, everyone wants to share their personal perspective and like, oh, I always think this way. I mean, for me, I have an internal narrator all the time. So I know what that camp feels like, but. Yeah, I had a conversation with someone recently who was asking me about some of this research.

And this person was saying, I work at home alone. This was a web designer. And he was saying, all I do is talk to myself all the time in my head. That's just my life. And so the notion that that reality might not characterize other people's experiences was to use the technical term, a mindblower for that person. And so I think that's what we saw happen on Twitter surrounding this conversation. So, you know, how is this different from people who hear voices?

I mean, hearing voices is often associated with serious mental illness like schizophrenia. So can you differentiate between what we mean by internal monologue and, hearing voices? Yeah, it's a great question. And there are a couple of distinctions worth noting. So oftentimes, when we're talking about the inner voice, I'm talking about the awareness that verbal processing is occurring, but that I can, so, you know, when I repeat a phone number, my child's phone number, I can, I have the subjective experience of using language to repeat that number. I'm not just seeing it. I'm internally hearing those words. But I know that the source of that, quote, unquote, inner voice is me, right?

I don't think that the voice is coming from some other external entity like the government or aliens and so forth. So that's the first distinction worth noting that typically when we're talking about the inner voice, we usually, we know where it's coming from and it's usually ourselves and has this abstract quality to it. Now, that's not to say that we're not capable of hearing other voices, too. So many people, if I asked you to imagine your mother telling you to clean up your room right now, you could probably simulate that experience and actually hear your mother's voice in your head or some approximation of it. And so that would be you hearing your mom. And so we can hear other voices. But again, typically you know that the voice is coming from, you are the source of your mom's voice. It's not your mom implanting herself in your head and controlling you.

And so when we get into mental illness, this line between knowing the source of the voice, whether it's coming from me or the external world, that tends to get blurred. And so oftentimes in the case of schizophrenia and other kinds of auditory hallucinations, we are a true. distributing this voice to another agent. Now, I should say there have been studies which ask people, like, do you ever hear voices and believe they come from other sources? For example, like God is the voice in your head delivering a message from God? And there are people who do not need, like, diagnostic criteria for mental illness who do report hearing the voice of God and believing it's coming from somewhere else. So the line between mental illness and normality in this context, it's not cut and dry. There are other elements that go into a diagnosis.

Does that help give you a sense of the terrain? Yeah, it does. And I think I've often heard it's people who have auditory hallucinations. It's like as a person was next to you talking to you as opposed to inside your head. Is that correct or is it very? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that captures part of the phenomenon. And many perfectly normal healthy individuals experience those kinds of auditory hallucinations at some point in their life. And so when we're making diagnoses of mental illness, we're taking into account lots of information, not just the frequency of those kinds of events, but other diagnostic criteria too. Okay. So people can rest easy if they have an inner monologue. They're not likely suffering from a serious mental illness. Yeah. If that's the only thing that's an inner monologue.

Intermonologue. I think we'd all be in big trouble if that were the case. Yeah, exactly. So are we born with an inner monologue and when does it develop? That's a great question. And, you know, there's not a ton of research that looks at this. What we do know is that what I've seen, the earliest study I've seen, looking at verbal working memory, which is when we are using language to rehearse information

and keeping it fresh in mind, that that capacity we can see evidence for it, at around 18 months of age. But that's not to say that it doesn't develop earlier. That's simply what we've documented thus far. And so relatively early on in the lifespan, although that, you know, of course, depends on who you're talking to. But that's the earliest I've seen evidence for this coming online. And does it help children develop self-control?

I think you, you know, I spoke briefly about that, how a child might be told instructions by a parent, and then they repeat them out loud, and it becomes their inner voice. maybe to help them regulate their behavior, put away your toys, wash your hands, that kind of thing. Yeah, so this is a really interesting angle on all this work. So many psychologists believe that the inner voice is actually central to how we learn to control ourselves. And so one of the key ways that we learn self-control is through the interactions we have with our parents,

where our parents or caretakers give us instructions. They tell us what to do and what not to do. So put your toys away and don't pick your nose at the dinner table. Well, you probably shouldn't pick your nose anywhere, but you get the point. And if you've ever spent some time around children, what you often see is this really fun and curious and magical kind of event where kids go off on their own and they start talking to themselves oftentimes out loud to begin with. They're like giving themselves instructions, right?

So like, no, I shouldn't pick my nose at the dinner table or, or yes, I have to go clean my room. And they're essentially repeating what their caretakers are saying, are telling them to do, right? They're repeating it to themselves. And the idea is that this is the way in which self-control is developing. Messages from our caretakers and our culture more generally are getting injected into our own lives. And we're rehearsing them as kids out loud. And what happens is that over time, we don't do that out loud, but that process then goes internal. It becomes a silent inner monologue where we are directing ourselves, so to speak, you know, privately.

And that then becomes a tool that some psychologists and scientists, myself included, think that we rely on throughout our lives as a very powerful tool, this ability to use language to control ourselves. One thing when I read an interview you did with Today.com, and you spoke about how you don't necessarily need to hear to have an inner voice. You know, I find that interesting because I, in a previous life, I worked at Gallaudet University, which is a deaf university. So I was surrounded by deaf people on campus all the time and have deaf friends and no sign language and all that. So what you said is that you don't need to have, you know, you don't need to be able to hear to have an inner voice that perhaps maybe a deaf person, you know, sees sign language in their head, sees words, that sort of thing. So can you elaborate on that? Yeah. So there's like a really interesting question, right? If this inner voice is central to, is fundamental to how we live our lives, right? It's used in all these different capacities.

What happens to people who have impoverished verbal capacities or linguistic capacities? And so hearing impaired populations are one. And so there has been a little bit of work on this that shows, as you just implied, that people who are hearing impaired also report silently talking to themselves, so to speak. And one of the ways in which they report doing so is simply using the same communication channel that they use to communicate with people in their worlds, right? So they're engaging in not in inner talking, so verbally, but with inner signing, using seeing signs in their mind as they are engaging in this kind of internal introspection. So it's happening, but they're using a different modality to do it.

Have you done any research on bilingual people? Would a bilingual person have an inner monologue in two languages? You know, I haven't done any work on that. It's really interesting. There is work showing that among bilinguals, the language that you use to reach, reason about experiences can have in some cases quite interesting implications for how you think. So if you think about an emotional event in your second language, the impact it has on you is blunted, right?

So it doesn't have the same emotional punch than if you think about it in your native language. Your native language is the language where you learn swear words and, you know, your first learning like your experience of emotion is encoded using your native language. And so the idea is that when you switch to the non-native language, those emotional tags and experiences are stripped away as well. So there's a lot of work in that area. It's also, I think, I speak different languages and it's easy for me to swap into another language deliberately if I want to silently speak Spanish and rehearse a number, I can. So I think that flexibility exists. The question of when, you know, do people oscillate back and forth? That I'm not sure. I am aware of some

anecdotal reports among people who have studied abroad who tell me that they've begun, they start dreaming in a foreign language. And we do find our inner voice perking up during our dreams too. Our dreams often have verbal information. You process verbally in our dreams. too. So I think there's some, I think it is likely to occur, but I just don't know of any evidence that has really nailed it. Yeah, an interesting area that could be studied in the future, for sure. Have you done any research about people who talk out loud to themselves? You know, we have, so it's a great question. It often comes up. We haven't touched this yet, and I think it's a really interesting topic. So in some work, we find that, you know, if you

talk to yourself, in particular in the third person, when you're trying to manage yourself. So if I've got a really, you know, a big presentation and I'm nervous, try to work through my feelings, not in the first one, hey, what am I going to say? But what is Ethan going to say? Why is Ethan nervous? Engaging in that shift from first to third can be helpful for giving people distance from their experience, making, hey, it's not about you, like it's about someone else, and relieving anxiety and improving performance as a result. And so some people often ask, well, what if you did that out loud? And my intuition is that it would be likewise beneficial, but, and this is an important but, you can't do it when other people are around you because there's a huge social stigma that exists about people talking

to themselves out loud that violate social convention quite powerfully. And so I think there are other ramifications that that might have for people. So the short answer to your question, which I just didn't give you, is that no, we haven't looked at this out loud. But I think my guess is that there are instances, like we know there are instances where people are frustrated and almost to the point of not being able to contain their frustration, they blurk things out to themselves. And there's a whole set of interesting questions that surround that behavior that warrant future study. So when does your inner model log go from? being helpful to being self-defeating?

So I think that happens when we, you know, we often use our inner monologue to solve problems. And it can be a really tool, a useful tool for helping us think through, like simulate different possibilities for what might happen and come to a realization about how we should respond or behave or act.

And so super duper useful ability, right? The ability to simulate and plan and the inner voice is something that helps us do that in many contexts. Where I think the inner voice can and does get us into not just trouble, but big trouble, is when that planning simulation process runs off course as it does when we tend to ruminate or worry excessively or perseverate on negative things in our lives. There's a ton of data showing that when we are constantly rehearsing the negative things. Well, what if this happens, and what should I do or I can't believe I said this and how am I going to feel?

And what if this happens, engaging that kind of cyclical verbal negative dynamic? What that does is that it elevates our stress levels and it keeps those stress levels elevated over time. And that can have strikingly negative implications for many of the things that matter most to us, for example, are helped, right? So there's a lot of data showing that when we're ruminating and persevering, and perseverating excessively over negative things in our life that activates our fight or flight response and keeps it activated chronically over time. Not very good. If we're spending all

of our time, you know, lost in verbal thought, so to speak, over the negative things in our lives, our ability to think and reason is limited. So what happens if you're spending all your time occupying the limited resources you have for thinking abstractly and planning, focusing on this one negative thing or several negative things, that then basically tunes out other important areas of your life where you might want to use your mind, your problem-solving capacity. And so it can affect our decision-making. Like, imagine, for example, have you ever had the experience of trying to read a book when you're ruminating about a problem? Like when that happens, many people report anecdotally not being able to focus because these other negative thoughts are intruding in.

So it can really distract us from being good listeners or doing the jobs that we have at work or at school. And then finally, it can interfere with our relationships because one of the things we know about people when they experience heightened levels of inner voice run amok, so to speak, they tend to want to verbalize and talk about it to other people to get social support, and that's a great instinct. But what often happens is because these experiences are chronic, right? The inner voice is running on overdrive. The inner critic maybe is taking over.

Then they keep talking about it over and over and over again. And that can actually push those we love away. And so it can be not very good for us when the inner voice runs awry. So you're a director of your university's emotion and self-control lab. And in your lab, you've done research on rumination. And you've said that self-distance can help. Can you explain what self-distancing is and how you can do this when something upsetting happens? Sure.

And so self-distance is the ability to essentially focus on yourself from a more objective, psychologically removed perspective. To illustrate why it matters, I usually ask people to think of a time when a friend or loved one came to them with a problem that they were ruminating about or worried excessively about. And the problem wasn't really relative to them, just their friend. In these situations, most people report being able to easily coach their friends through their problems, give them advice about what they should do, how they should act, and so forth. And I would argue, and there's lots of days to support this, that the reason for that is because the problem is not happening

to you, right? So you have psychological distance from that experience. And as a result, you're capable of thinking about it more objectively. What we've learned about human beings is that we have evolved to possess different psychological hacks, if you will, for providing us with distance from our own problems. And that's what we've studied in the lab. What are these different tools that people possess to get some mental space from the problems that they're experiencing so that they can think about them more similar to how they might think about another person's problems?

And one important tool that we've studied along those lines is language, is the inner voice. So in a certain sense, there are ways of using the inner voice to combat the toxic inner voice when it runs away. And one of those tools is something we call distanced self-talk, which involves using your own name or other non-first-person pronouns, words like you or he or she, to think about your life when you're experiencing probably. problematic rumination or anxiety provoking experiences. So if I'm really worried about making a good impression on you during this podcast, instead of thinking, what am I going to say and why am I going to say that? I might think, well, what is Ethan going to say and why is Ethan going to say that? And what we find is that that subtle shift from I to using your own name promotes distance

and helps people think about experiences in a more healthy and ultimately adaptive way. And I'll just add one more point. The reason we think that this is so effective is because if you think about the context in which we use names, right? Most of the time we use names when we think about or refer to other people, right? Like 99% of the time we use names or are thinking about or referring to another person. And so the idea is that when you use a name to refer to yourself, it's almost like this little psychological jujitsu move where you're getting yourself to think about yourself like you are someone else.

So you're using language to change the way you're actually thinking about the self. So that's distant self-talk in a nutshell. That's great. I've never even thought about that as a way to think of yourself and the third person as you're going through a challenging time because you can also, again, treat. yourself as though you would treat a friend because you likely would treat a friend or family member, you know, loved one better than you might talk to yourself in a lot of cases. So are there other distancing strategies you can employ when needed? Yeah. So there's a whole toolbox of distancing

strategies that exist. Another another one that is empirically validated and I find personally find useful is to imagine how you're going to feel a week or a month or a year later, right? So something called temporal distancing. It's kind of like a mental time travel where oftentimes we get so consumed with what is happening in the moment. We forget that with time, things change and actually oftentimes things get better. And so if you find yourself ruminating about something, you might think, well, how am I going to feel about this a year from now or 10 years from now? That's another kind of distancing hack. There's some work showing that writing expressively about your experiences.

So doing something like journaling is also something that has been shown to be effective for helping people cope with negative experiences. And one pathway through which it works, not the only one, but one has to do with distance, right? So when you're writing about your own experiences,

you're becoming the target, right? Like you're thinking about yourself as this character in a play that is your life. And so there's a distancing quality, quality that writing about one's experiences can also have. And so those are just a couple of examples. There are quite a few more that exist that you can read about in various places. I'm happy to refer people to sources if that'd be helpful. We can touch on that a bit at the end. So you also research social rejection and emotional pain. Why and how does something emotional cause physical

pain. Great question. And yeah, we have done some work looking at, you know, there's this curious phenomenon where people who find themselves ostracized or excommunicated or just rejected from work or in love do this seemingly strange thing. They use this language of physical pain to talk about their experience. They say, my feelings are hurt. I'm in pain. And so that has been curious, a curious kind of phenomenon for many of us in the field. Why would a person use words that are normally specific to the experience of physical pain to describe this emotional experience? And one idea has to do with the fact that because our social relationships are so

absolutely central to our ability to succeed and thrive in this world, right? Human beings, we are a social species. We thrive on these social relationships. that we have evolved in ways that we need really powerful cues that alert us to danger when those social ties are severed. And one of the best systems that exist for warning us of potential danger is pain, right? If we go to touch a stove and we sense heat, we instantly pull back our hand. And so the idea is that within human beings, we make use of the physical pain system that exists. It's a very primitive system for alerting us to danger and getting us to quickly

respond as a result. And so we rely on that system when we experience potentially socially threatening experiences. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. It does. And how can people better cope with rejection? Well, you know, many of the tools that exist for coping with negative experiences more generally, like experiences that might cause you. If you feel anxiety or anger or sadness also apply to coping with rejection. So some of the distancing tools that we've already talked about, I think would be useful for coping with rejection. There's some data to support that. They're also, of course, leveraging our social relationships with other people. So finding people to talk about our problems who are skilled in helping us see the bigger picture, not getting

stuck in the detail. So oftentimes you go to other people for help, and they don't actually help you because in their attempts to be supportive, they end up just getting you to think through how awful you feel as a result. So to make it concrete, let's say you're rejected. Oh, my God, I can't believe you were just rejected. You must feel awful. I'm so sorry. Where did it happen? What happened?

So in my attempt to connect with you, I am essentially just getting you to think over and over about to rehearse the negative features of your experience. And that can be not so helpful long term. So there's some evidence that what makes really good social support is when you go to someone else, they're capable of connecting with you and showing you that they care. So they learn a little bit about what you're going through. But then they really shift to trying to help you put the experience in perspective. Right. So, well, you know what?

They're more efficiency. Right. Like that's the cliche, right? or let's look at the big picture. You know what? Two years from now, things are going to look different. So in a certain sense, other people can be tools that help give us more space, more perspective, more distance.

And so that's another thing that people can do. And there are boatloads of other techniques and tools that exist for helping people manage rumination that, you know, nature is one that has been recently quite extensively studied. there are religious rituals that people engage in, or even non-religious rituals that can be helpful. So that's really a huge question with lots of, we probably need a lot more time to get into all those techniques in depth. But you've offered a lot of great tips in terms of how to handle rumination, rejection, those things that just happen. I think most people can say that those things have happened in their lives at some point. I want to turn out to some other work you do in your lab, and you've done some research on social networking sites and well-being.

And in a paper you published, you ask that very question that's on the minds of many today, does social media make us feel better or worse? What did you find? So what we find is that so when you use social media in a particular way, it predicts a decline in how good people feel. And in particular, when people passively use social media, meaning that they log into their social media. sites. We've studied primarily Facebook and they browse what's happening in their social media universe. That tends to lead people to feel envy, feelings of envy, which in turn predicts declines and how good they feel. And how we think all this works is as follows. We know that people are motivated to present themselves flatteringly in the eyes of others. We all do it all

the time, not just on social media, but in the offline world as well. So I wake up. I usually, if I know I'm going to see other people, I shave, I comb my hair, I put on a shirt that's not ripped and stained. And I do that because I want to convey a particular impression. But there are limits to how that impression management process works in the offline world, right? Like I can comb my hair and shave, but, you know, the hair can get messed up. And maybe I nick myself when I'm shaving and there's nothing I can really do about that. Well, when you transition to the social media universe, things change quite dramatically. Our ability to curate the way we present ourselves goes on hyperdrive. You can air brush out the blemishes. You can make sure that it's the perfect

snapshot, right? It's like the one photo out of the hundred you take in that really captures things best and you can post that. And so then the question is, well, what happens when you are logging in and not only seeing this this kind of hypercureated presentation of other people's lives, like not just a single snapshot, but when you're scrolling through a series of snapshots, right? So everyone is looking great. Everyone is having a great vacation. Everyone is talking about good things. There's basically lots of 50 years of psychology gives you an answer to that question, right? Like what happens when you bathe yourself and the positive experiences of others can lead you to feel bad about your own life because you are aware of the normalcy of your own life,

meaning you're not just having all positive experiences and so forth. And so that's what we and others have found. And the take home, I think, is that if one way to try to minimize this is to try to use these sites more actively to connect and share with other people, there's some evidence suggesting that is less harmful in terms of the emotional implications. And as we wrap up, I just want to focus on one more study you did that I think we'll have implications for this year, which is an election year here in the U.S. It's from a study you co-authored, in 2011 that examined how people fail to be reasonable over issues that have deeply personal implications, like an election. In that study you focused on the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

Can you explain more about your findings and what, if anything, has changed in the past nine years? Yeah. So in that work, what we wanted to do is look at how, how distance in which we've talked about thus far, how its ability to step outside yourself and look at the situation more objectively, how that might influence something like wisdom, which we defined as, like, so wisdom is the ability to manage social dilemmas effectively. And two important qualities of wisdom, so what makes someone wise, it's recognizing the limits of one's own knowledge, this understanding that, look, as much as I may know about something, I can't possibly know it all. So intellectual humility is something that's often referred to. and then also something called dialecticism, right? Fancy word to basically convey the idea that the world is constantly in flux and things are likely to change.

And so what we wanted to do is see whether asking people to think about the election. And what was going to happen if the person who you didn't endorse won the election? Granted, things currently are, I think, much more emotionally charged than they were back in 2008. But the question was, like, does getting people to think about the upcoming consequences of election from a distance perspective lead them to be less extreme in their reaction? So might it lead people to say, well, you know what? It may not pan out the way I want, but I get that this happens every four years. And, you know, this candidate will come and maybe they'll go. or I don't know, maybe they will surprise me.

So getting a little bit more humility emerging in your forecast as well. And that is in fact what we found. So the people who were capable of distancing when they thought about what was going to happen showed evidence of being more aware of the limits of their own knowledge and were more likely to indicate that the future was likely to change in ways that they couldn't predict. And do you think that would be effective, you know, this election year and subsequent election years? The ability to adopt that kind of mindset?

Yeah, well, I think it's a great question, you know, to see what happens there. As I said, like, I think the stakes now are, I think, higher in many ways. My intuition is that this is a much more emotionally charged climate that we are living through. So I think one question is, like, are people capable of distancing? because it may be more challenging to do so, the more immersed you are in the experience. I think people now are very immersed. But I do think that if you are capable of getting some space,

you do realize you're more likely to realize that as challenging as things may be, if they don't work out the way you want them to work out, we do get to do this again in four years, right? I mean, like, think about the ultimate distancing exercise here when it comes to a political climate. Like, we've been around for a while, our species on this planet. We've experienced changes in leaders and, you know, the borders of nations, and so to speak,

and we've made it through, right? So we will likely do it again. This same idea, this same kind of perspective, broad and distancing was, I think, recently applied very effectively when talking about the coronavirus, the coronavirus that we're dealing with, right? Like most of the media is focused, is zooming us in on just how much deadlier this virus is than the seasonal flu. And this is causing a lot of panic among people. I think it's the evidence of this when you just look at the masks flying off the shelves at every drugstore and Costco across the nation. Well, one public health official recently said, this is not an existential threat.

We have experienced pandemics like this before. Epidemics, pandemics, use whatever term is appropriate right now. And we've lived through it. And we will live through this again. And that, again, that's a perspective broadening tool that they invoked, that at least in terms of the reaction, the effect it had on me, it was quite powerful. And I suspect it would be on others, too, based on what I know about the science behind it. So earlier you mentioned you have resources for people to go for more information. Where should they go?

So they could check out my website for my lab, the University of Michigan Emotion Self-controlled Lab. And there are lots of articles and news coverage on some of the things we talked about there. And I also have a book coming out on this called Chatter, The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters and How to Harness It Coming out next year that will integrate a lot of the things we discussed that they could check out. out too. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Cross. This has been a really awesome conversation. I think we'll have people talking, whether it's inside their head or outside their head to other people. Yes. Thank you so much for having. It was a lot of fun. If you have any comments or ideas to share, send us an email to Speaking of Psychology at APA.org. That's speaking of psychology, all one word, dot org. And also please consider giving us a rating

in iTunes. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also go to our website, speakingof psychology.org. I'm Caitlin Luna with the American Psychological Association. Thanks for listening.