In a workshop here at LTH led by Peter Felten in December, I wrote down something he said after having asked participants to think about stories of personal experiences to exemplify a point, and that was to talk about positive experiences using “I”, and negative ones using the third person, because that’s “psychologically better” (even though it might seem weird). I was thinking about this today planning a workshop I am giving soon, and wanted to back up the “psychologically better” part of my own instruction of talking in the third person with some research. Long story short (mainly because I only read a lot of abstracts and hence don’t want to actually cite any article I didn’t read…) — a quick google scholar search totally supports the “psychologically better” on many different measures in many different studies: higher life satisfaction, lower hostility, increased feeling of agency, less emotional pain. So there really seems to be something to it, and even though I can’t point to the One Study or fully understand the mechanisms (more than that self-distancing seems to be good to provide more perspective and overview), I’ll definitely follow his example, and pass on his advice!
When talking about our negative experiences, it’s good to use the third person
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