Abstract

The current study examined the effects of the type and context of self-talk on task performance, task-post emotion, and perceived stress. Participants were 100 undergraduates in Busan. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four the experimental groups that were set by combining the narrative condition (the first-person versus non-first-person) to the content condition (self-reinforcing versus self-critic) to measure their pre and post intervention responses . For the analysis, we performed two-ways analysis of variance using the difference value of dependent variables comparing the pre and post-intervention. As a result of the analysis, we found that content condition of self-talk significantly influenced task performance, task-related confidence, emotion response, and perceived stress. That is, the self-reinforcement self-talk group showed better performance, higher task-related confidence, more positive emotion, lower negative emotion and less perceived stress than the self-critic self-talk group. The contents conditions of self-talk interacted with the narrative condition of self-talk to predict perceived stress, indicating that only non-first person/self-reinforceing self-talk group showed reduced levels of perceived stress.