SHORT PAPER ‐ 5000 WORDS OR LESS Self‐reported inner speech use in university students Alain Morin 1 | Christina Duhnych 1 | Famira Racy 1,2 1 Department of Psychology, Mount Royal University, Calgary, Alberta, Canada 2 Department of Psychology, Adler University, Chicago, USA Correspondence Alain Morin, Department of Psychology, Mount Royal University, 4825 Richard Road S. W., Calgary, Alberta, Canada T3E 6K6. Email: amorin@mtroyal.ca Summary Remarkably little is known regarding what people talk to themselves about (inner speech use) in their everyday lives. Existing self‐directed speech measures (e.g., thought sampling and question- naires) either uniquely capture inner speech frequency and neglect its content or classify self‐ reported thoughts instances in overly simplistic categories determined by the researchers. In the current study, we describe an open‐format thought listing procedure as well as a refined cod- ing scheme and present detailed inner speech content self‐generated by 76 university students. The most frequently self‐reported inner speech activities were self‐regulation (e.g., planning and problem solving), self‐reflection (e.g., emotions, self‐motivation, appearance, behavior/per- formance, and autobiography), critical thinking (e.g., evaluating, judging, and criticizing), people in general, education, and current events. Inner speech occurred most commonly while studying and driving. These results are consistent with the self‐regulatory and self‐referential functions of inner speech often emphasized in the literature. Future research avenues using the open‐format inner speech listing procedure and coding scheme are proposed. KEYWORDS content analysis, inner speech, self‐directed speech, self‐reflection, self‐regulation, self‐report, self‐ talk, thought listing 1 | INTRODUCTION Talking to oneself, either aloud (private speech) or in silence (inner speech), has been shown to be associated with multiple positive emo- tional, cognitive, and behavioral consequences (Alderson‐Day & Fernyhough, 2015a; Fernyhough, 2016; Hardy, 2005; Morin, 2012; Morin, in press; Morin, 2017; Perrone‐Bertolotti, Rapin, Lachaux, Baciu, & Lœvenbruck, 2014). Self‐directed speech is known to play a substantial role in self‐regulation (Kross et al., 2014; Vygotsky, 1943), thinking (i.e., planning, problem solving, reasoning, decision making, and setting goals—for reviews, see Sokolov, 1972; Winsler, 2009; Zivin, 1979), short‐term memory (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974) and auto- biographical memory (Larsen, Schrauf, Fromholt, & Rubin, 2002), lan- guage (Abramson & Goldinger, 1997), task‐switching performance (Karbach & Kray, 2009), rehearsing person‐to‐person communicative encounters (Rubin, 1979), emotional expression, self‐reflection (Bastian et al., 2017; DeSouza, DaSilveira, & Gomes, 2008; Morin, 2005; Morin, in press; Morin, 2017; Salas & Yuen, 2016), and possibly theory of mind (Fernyhough & Meins, 2009). This involvement of inner speech in such a large number of important cognitive and behavioral functions signifies that it certainly represents a key aspect of our men- tal life. It also suggests that inner speech has numerous everyday practical applications such as remembering what we did 2 days ago (autobiography), planning to buy bread on our way home (prospection), and frequently monitoring our food intake in order to maintain a healthy weight (self‐regulation). In other words, knowing when, why, and what we talk to ourselves about has implications for various factors involved in health and well‐being in clinical and nonclinical contexts such as therapy, work, sports, and education. Brain‐imaging studies suggest that the most prominent neural correlates of inner speech are the left inferior frontal gyrus, Wernicke's area, the supplementary motor area, insula, left superior parietal lobe, and right posterior cerebellar cortex (Alderson‐Day et al., 2016; Fama, Hayward, Snider, Friedman, & Turkeltaub, 2017; Geva et al., 2011; Hurlburt, Alderson‐Day, Kühn, & Fernyhough, 2016; Perrone‐ Bertolotti et al., 2014). Numerous inner speech assessment methods exist (De Guerrero, 2005; Kendall & Hollon, 1981; Morin & Uttl, 2013), yet remarkably little is known regarding people's use of inner speech in everyday life. Recent studies using thought sampling techniques (i.e., beepers signal- ing respondents to report aspects of their inner experiences at random intervals; e.g., Heavey & Hurlburt, 2008) shed light on how often people engage in inner speech (arguably, approximately 20% of the time with large individual differences) but offer no insight into inner Received: 12 July 2017 Revised: 9 January 2018 Accepted: 13 February 2018 DOI: 10.1002/acp.3404 Appl Cognit Psychol. 2018;1–7. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/acp 1