Alain Morin

Inner speech represents the activity of talking to oneself in silence. It can be assessed with questionnaires, sampling methods, and electromyographic recordings of articulatory movements. Inner speech has been linked to thought processes and self-awareness. Private speech (speech-for-self emitted aloud by children) serves an important self-regulatory function. The frequency of private speech follows an inverted-U relation with age, peaking at 3-4 years of age and disappearing at age 10. Social and inner speech share a common neurological basis: Broca’s area. Dysfunctional self-talk is known to mediate many pathological conditions; negative selfverbalizations have a more significant debilitating impact than positive ones.

Self-awareness represents the capacity of becoming the object of one’s own attention. In this state one actively identifies, processes, and stores information about the self. This paper surveys the self-awareness literature by emphasizing definition issues, measurement techniques, effects and functions of self-attention, and antecedents of self-awareness. Key self-related concepts (e.g., minimal, reflective consciousness) are distinguished from the central notion of self-awareness. Reviewed measures include questionnaires, implicit tasks, and self-recognition. Main effects and functions of self-attention consist in selfevaluation, escape from the self, amplification of one's subjective experience, increased self-knowledge, self-regulation, and inferences about others' mental states (Theory-of-Mind). A neurocognitive and socioecological model of self-awareness is described in which the role of face-to-face interactions, reflected appraisals, mirrors, media, inner speech, imagery, autobiographical knowledge, and neurological structures is underlined

Summary.— Recent empirical work in social cognition suggests that in building a self-concept people make inferences about themselves based on overt behavior or private thoughts and feelings. This article addresses the question of how, exactly, people make these inferences about themselves and raises the possibility that they do so through self-talk. It is proposed that the more on talks to oneself to construct a selfimage, the more this image will gain coherence and sophistication. A correlational study was conducted to explore the relation between richness of the self-concept (using the W-A-Y) and natural disposition to talk to oneself (using a pilot questionnaire). A moderate but positive correlation of .30 is obtained. The article concludes with clinical implications.

Merker’s definition of consciousness excludes self-reflective thought, making his proposal for decorticate consciousness not particularly groundbreaking. He suggests that brainstem sites are neglected in current theories of consciousness. This is so because broader definitions of consciousness are used. Split-brain data show that the cortex is important for full-blown consciousness; also, behaviors exhibited by hydranencephaly patients and decorticated rats do not seem to require reflective consciousness

This article raises the question of how we acquire self-information through self-talk, i.e., of how self-talk mediates self-awareness. It is first suggested that two social mechanisms leading to self-awareness could be reproduced by self-talk: engaging in dialogues with ourselves, in which we talk to fictive persons, would permit an internalization of others' perspectives; and addressing comments to ourselves about ourselves, as others do toward us, would allow an acquisition of self-information. Secondly, it is proposed that self-observation is possible only if there exists a distance between the individual and any potentially observable self-aspect; self-talk, because it conveys self-information under a different form , would create a redundancy -- and with it, a wedge -- within the self

In my 2003 SCR paper “Inner speech and conscious experience” (LINK) I put forward the notion that we most often need to talk to ourselves in order to understand who we are. That is, inner speech is frequently required to access self-information and to gradually build a self- concept. To illustrate, let’s imagine that you want to reflect on an abdominal pain you are currently experiencing. It is very likely that you will engage in an internal monologue, thinking “Why is it that my belly hurts? I feel cramps... Ha! I get it—I skipped breakfast...” You could go on and also notice: “I’ve been missing breakfast often lately... I tend to sleep in, I don’t eat breakfast, and by noon I’m starving... And I didn’t go to the gym as often as I should have... This is bad—I’m getting _lazy_...” Here the adjective “lazy” constitutes the conclusion that you have drawn from your inner monologue; it may then become a more or less permanent part of your self-concept