Jason S. Moser
Jason Moser is a psychologist in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University. He is the first author of a 2017 paper in Scientific Reports that tested whether talking to yourself in the third person calms you because it takes extra effort, or because it changes your vantage point. The answer from his data was the second.
Who they are
Moser studies how people regulate emotion, and how those processes show up in the brain's electrical activity and in brain imaging. He was also an author on the 2014 paper led by Ethan Kross that introduced distanced self-talk as a laboratory technique, and on a 2022 replication of the 2017 photograph study published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology.
The 2017 paper is his first-authored contribution to that line of work, and it is the one that tested the mechanism most directly.
This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.
Key papers
Third-person self-talk facilitates emotion regulation without engaging cognitive control (2017), with Ethan Kross and colleagues. Published in Scientific Reports. In the first study, undergraduates viewed disturbing and neutral photographs while their brain's electrical activity was recorded; 29 of 37 were analysed. In the second, 50 adults recalled painful memories inside a brain scanner. Using their own name reduced the emotional response to the photographs, and during the memories it reduced reported distress and activity in a medial prefrontal region, with no added activity in the regions linked to deliberate control.
Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: how you do it matters (2014), Kross and colleagues, Moser among the authors. Seven studies with 585 people found that addressing yourself by name or as "you" before a stressful task reduced distress and improved rated performance.
Key ideas
The central idea is that distanced self-talk is cheap. Many ways of managing emotion, such as deliberately reinterpreting a situation, demand effort and show up in the brain's control regions. Moser's study found that switching the pronoun did its work without that cost, which is one reason the technique is often presented as usable in the moment.
The evidence has limits. The studies are short laboratory tasks with modest samples, and most of the supporting work comes from the same group of authors. A 2022 meta-analysis of 48 self-distancing experiments found the effects small, and found pronoun changes alone weaker than methods combining visual distancing with talking a situation through.
Sources
- Moser, J. S., Dougherty, A., Mattson, W. I., et al., & Kross, E. (2017). Third-person self-talk facilitates emotion regulation without engaging cognitive control: converging evidence from ERP and fMRI. Scientific Reports, 7, 4519. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-04047-3
- Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., et al. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: how you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304-324. doi:10.1037/a0035173