The Paper Under Every Affirmation Post

There is one PubMed link that keeps turning up under affirmation posts. You have seen it at the bottom of a paragraph about the amygdala, or cortisol, or a groove being dug deeper by repetition. It makes the paragraph feel checked.

If you are the kind of reader who clicks, this is for you. The paper is real and it is good. It is not the paper the paragraph describes.

What the link goes to

The link is Cascio and colleagues, 2016, in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, from Emily Falk's group at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School.

Sixty-seven sedentary adults ranked eight personal values. A week later, in an fMRI scanner, the affirmed group thought about times their top value had mattered, and times it could matter in the future. The control group did the same with their lowest-ranked value. Nobody chanted anything.

Reflecting on your own top value engaged two things at once: the regions the brain uses to process the self (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate), and the regions it uses for reward and valuation (ventral striatum, ventromedial prefrontal cortex). The effect was strongest on the future-oriented trials. And that activity predicted something outside the scanner. Measured by accelerometer, the affirmed group sat less over the following month, and the people with the strongest scanner response changed the most.

A personal picture of your future self, held in mind on purpose, registers in the brain's valuation system, and the strength of that response tracked a real change in behavior a month out.

The amygdala does not appear in the paper. Neither does cortisol. We read all 8,500 words to check. Those claims got attached to the link somewhere downstream.

The cousin paper

Two papers from the same lab and the same 67 people get merged into one. Falk and colleagues, 2015, in PNAS, asked a different question: after affirming their values, how do people respond to health messages they would otherwise find threatening? The affirmed group showed more activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex during those messages, and again that activity predicted less sitting over the next month.

One is about taking in a hard message after affirming. The other is about the affirmation itself. Neither is about the amygdala.

Where the cortisol claim comes from

The stress finding is a different paper, a decade earlier. Creswell and colleagues, 2005, had 85 people do a values affirmation or a control task before a lab stressor, then measured cortisol. The affirmed group's cortisol response was lower. Creswell again in 2013: 80 chronically stressed students, hard problems under time pressure in front of an evaluator. Among the underperforming, chronically stressed ones, affirmation meant more problems solved.

How far the finding reaches

None of these people repeated "I can handle this." They ranked a list of values, took the one at the top, and reflected on it, in writing or in their heads depending on the study. Personal, first-person, in a lab, once.

So the evidence says: reflecting on a value you hold, especially about your future, does something measurable, and the strength of it predicted behavior. It does not say that any sentence, in any voice, repeated any number of times, does the same. On the form of self-talk, Kross and colleagues in 2014 found that form matters. Across seven studies and 585 people, using your own name or "you" instead of "I" while working through something stressful meant less distress and better performance under social stress, with the performance rated by objective judges.

Personal beats generic. Future beats present. The pronoun changes the effect. And the dose that gets you from a scanner result to a changed habit is not in any of these papers.

What you can do with this

Neuralingual builds from the finding, and says plainly where it goes past it.

You type what you want to become, however you'd say it: faster off the bike at the turn, calm on the first tee, someone who sleeps through the night, wealthier in a way you could describe out loud. The affirmations get composed from that, so they are about you and about your future by construction. Those are the two variables the scanner study found doing the work. Whether a spoken, repeated version does what a one-time reflection did is our bet, not their result.

Then a coach says them to you, in second person. "You have done this in practice a hundred times," not "I am confident." The pronoun research tested people talking to themselves, not a coach talking to them. The shift from "I" to "you" is the tested part; the second voice is ours. You listen on the drive over, on the walk, before sleep, enough times that the phrasing starts showing up on its own in the moment it is for.

You will hear the objection that affirmations should be written by a person, not generated. A card written by a stranger is a stranger's sentence, however well written. What you get here was composed from your stated outcome, for your situation, in a voice you chose. That is more personal than a card, not less. What to insist on is that the words be about you, that you believe them, and that you hear them enough.

Your future self is what the scanner lit up for. Say who that is. Then say it enough.

Sources

• Cascio, C. N., O'Donnell, M. B., Tinney, F. J., Lieberman, M. D., Taylor, S. E., Strecher, V. J., & Falk, E. B. (2016). Self-affirmation activates brain systems associated with self-related processing and reward and is reinforced by future orientation. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 11(4), 621–629. PubMed 26541373 · doi:10.1093/scan/nsv136
• Falk, E. B., O'Donnell, M. B., Cascio, C. N., Tinney, F., Kang, Y., Lieberman, M. D., Taylor, S. E., An, L., Resnicow, K., & Strecher, V. J. (2015). Self-affirmation alters the brain's response to health messages and subsequent behavior change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(7), 1977–1982. PubMed 25646442 · doi:10.1073/pnas.1500247112
• Creswell, J. D., Welch, W. T., Taylor, S. E., Sherman, D. K., Gruenewald, T. L., & Mann, T. (2005). Affirmation of personal values buffers neuroendocrine and psychological stress responses. Psychological Science, 16(11), 846–851. PubMed 16262767 · doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01624.x
• Creswell, J. D., Dutcher, J. M., Klein, W. M. P., Harris, P. R., & Levine, J. M. (2013). Self-affirmation improves problem-solving under stress. PLoS ONE, 8(5), e62593. PubMed 23658751 · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0062593
• Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304–324. PubMed 24467424 · doi:10.1037/a0035173

Neuralingual is not a clinical tool and this is not medical advice. Affirmations work on attention, identity, and the mindset you bring into the room.