In his discussion of the cognitive-behavioral procedure of "self-talk" Russ (25-68) states that self-talk is a conditioned pattern of thinking that manifests itself in what we say to ourselves within our own minds. Russ notes that people have a running dialog inside their own heads consisting of a steady stream of words about what they are seeing and feeling. It is also pointed out that this talk can be positive or negative, loving or critical. Whether positive or negative, how people talk to themselves creates their experience. It is our conditioned ways of thinking which generate emotions and activate behaviors. In other words, our whole way of being, acting and feeling is influenced by how we think and talk to ourselves.
The general notion of self-talk and its impact in human experience (both for good and for ill) grew out of the work of Albert Ellis (Ellis and MacLaren 13-25) who observed that the things that people think and say to themselves (not what actually happens) is the driver of their emotional state, and ultimately of their performance in a given situation. The claim that self-talk does mediate emotion and behavior has been verified in literally hundreds of studies (Skunk 21-54).
One area of the emotion/self-talk research that has been comprehensively examined is that of anxiety disorders in children and adolescents (Kendall, Chu and Pimental 235-287). The purpose of this paper is to examine the research on the relationship of self-talk to anxiety disorders in children and to then expand the research to a project undertaken to lower anxiety levels in a child through the use of the cognitive-behavioral intervention of self-talk.
According to a report issued by the Surgeon General (3-12), anxiety disorders are higher in children and adolescents than all other mental health disorders. The one-year prevalence rate in children ages 9 to 17 is about 13 percent. Kendell (40-46) reports that a wide variety of cogn...