THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE FREQUENCY OF SELF-TALK AND DISSOCIATIVE EXPERIENCES

Abstract

Defining self-talk as any instance wherein people are speaking to themselves, either out loud or mentally, and defining dissociation as any cognitively-disrupting phenomenon wherein people feel that they are disconnected from the world around them, I hypothesized that people who engaged in more self-talk had more dissociative experiences. The relationship between self-talk and dissociative experiences is one we measured on two different scales- first a scale on self-talk frequency, along with a scale on the frequency of dissociative experiences- followed up by statistical testing to measure the correlation between the two scales. Participants were 54 student volunteers who first participated in a self-talk study over a period of several days, and several weeks later, performed follow-up tests to measure their dissociative tendencies. The results supported my primary hypothesis that frequent self-talkers reported more dissociative experiences than infrequent self-talkers, but other exploratory hypotheses about the individual scales of self-talk and dissociation were not supported as strongly. The data were surprising, but ultimately supportive. Further research could explore other tendencies that belie self-talk and similar behaviors, as well as how cognitive disruption plays a role in self-talk, whether it be dissociation or otherwise.