Abstract
Descriptive experience sampling has suggested that there are five frequently occurring phenomena of inner experience: inner speaking, inner seeing, unsymbolized thinking, feelings, and sensory awareness. Descriptive experience sampling is a labor- and skill-intensive procedure, so it would be desirable to estimate the frequency of these phenomena by questionnaire. However, appropriate questionnaires either do not exist or have substantial limitations. We therefore created the Nevada Inner Experience Questionnaire (NIEQ), with five subscales estimating the frequency of each of the frequent phenomena, and examine here its psychometric adequacy. Exploratory factor analysis produced four of the expected factors (inner speaking, inner seeing, unsymbolized thinking, feelings) but did not produce a sensory awareness factor. Confirmatory factor analysis validated the five-factor model. The correlation between an existing self-talk questionnaire (Brinthaupt’s Self-Talk Scale) and the NIEQ inner speaking subscale provides one piece of concurrent validation.
Highlights
The term inner experience as we will use it here refers to directly apprehended “before the footlights of consciousness” inner events such as inner speaking, visual images, and sensations
The Nevada Inner Experience Questionnaire (NIEQ) was designed to measure directly by questionnaire the five frequent phenomena (5FP) of inner experience identified by Descriptive experience sampling (DES) studies
Psychometric evaluation showed that the NIEQ behaved as it was designed: confirmatory factor analysis showed that the five-factor model was a good fit for the NIEQ items and that the items loaded in the expected way
Summary
The term inner experience as we will use it here refers to directly apprehended “before the footlights of consciousness” inner events such as inner speaking, visual images, and sensations. It uses anchors (1 = Never, 2 = Seldom, 3 = Sometimes, 4 = Often, and 5 = Very Often) that are ambiguous: “Often” might refer to five times a day (“I often brush my teeth”) or five times a year (“Hurricanes often make landfall in the US”) Despite these limitations, the STS is occasionally used as an overall frequency measure (Brinthaupt et al, 2015) by recoding the ratings from 0 to 4 instead of 1 to 5, adding them, and dividing by 64 (the possible sum of scores), a procedure that assumes (with little warrant) equality of frequency across situations and across people. Here’s a sample mark: 1. How frequently do you talk to yourself in your inner voice?
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