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Fear of Public Speaking

About 40 percent of the American people suffer from fear of public speaking (McKiernan, 1984). Because of the scope of this problem both psychologists and educators have long been concerned with factors contributive to fear of public speaking, sometimes termed "communication apprehension". For example, Motley (1990) stated that fear of public speaking is caused by the speaker's focus on the need to perform and his/her anticipated assessment of personal oratorical skills. Indeed, in Motley's study, it was observed that when people do not conceptualize the event as a call for personal performance but rather view it as a chance to communicate a message, their anxiety over public speaking was much lower.

Beatty and Friedland (1990) studied the relative contribution of state and trait factors on fear of public speaking. Trait factors were found to be better predictors than state factors, in particular the factors of perceived novelty (seeing the audience from the perspective of the speaker), conspicuousness, and subordinate status were found to be strong predictors of public speaking state anxiety (as measured by the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension questionnaire). Indeed, in a similar study, Beatty (1988) replicated these findings and further observed that dissimilarity and degree of prior history of speech-making were also significant predictors of anxiety levels.

In another study examining for contributors to fear of public speaking, Daly, Vangelisti and Lawrence (1989) tested the hypothesis that high levels of anxiety were associated with excessive attention to self. Findings showed that while high anxiety speech-makers did not focus on themselves more than low anxiety speech-makers, the nature of the high anxiety speech-makers' self focus was significantly more negative than that of low anxiety speech-makers' self focus.

Bados (1987) also examined for differences between speech-makers with high levels of pub...

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Fear of Public Speaking. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 15:39, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1691479.html