UCLA

Intrapersonal communication examines how individuals interact with themselves from a communication perspective. We engage in self-talk, imagine interactions, generate internalized media such as visualizations, and so on, yet a unified study of these phenomena is missing. This dissertation aims to revive the study of intrapersonal communication by describing what it is through a literature review of related subjects and presenting frameworks for how it can be studied. Empirical work is then presented demonstrating a multidimensional approach to studying one example of intrapersonal communication – overt linguistic streams-of-consciousness. In a series of three studies, participants provide their typed or spoken streams-of-consciousness, aiming to report their thoughts continuously and spontaneously. The first study prompts participants to think about life before or during the COVID-19 pandemic to see how their thoughts about the future may shift through psychological momentum. From analyzing the language in the future-directed thoughts alone, it is possible to predict the temporal priming of prior thoughts. The second study then explores how typing versus speaking thoughts may impact how thoughts unfold. Typing enhanced lexical diversity as well as proportions of emotional language usage. When Large Language Models generated comparable thoughts, emotion language was reduced relative to humans. Finally, the third study manipulates the environment under which spoken thoughts are generated to see how darkness or the presence of a mirror may shift language and the delivery of our voices. Darkness and a mirror led to exploration of different language spaces, and speaking in the dark attenuated vocal intensity while boosting roughness. Together these studies show that the conditions under which we deliver our thoughts to ourselves can shape what we think about and how.