Neuroscience
Before you speak to an audience, can you first talk yourself out of feeling nervous? One step towards this strategy is to find out how confident people speak to themselves in their heads (their internal "self-talk"), compared with others who are more anxious.
Xiaowei Shi and his colleagues surveyed nearly 200 students on a public speaking course. The researchers approached the students after they'd given two public presentations on the course and were soon to give their third. The students answered questions about how much they'd engaged in self-talk in the preceding days, and about how much anxiety they feel towards public speaking.
The women tended to be more nervous than the men. Once this gender influence had been accounted for, the students' frequency of various types of self-talk over the last few days explained 20 per cent of the difference in their anxiety levels. Specifically, the more confident students tended to say they'd engaged in less self-critical self-talk (e.g. chastising themselves about their poor preparations) and less self-talk related to social assessment (e.g. replaying ways people had reacted in the past), whereas they had engaged in more self-talk related to self-reinforcement (e.g. talking to themselves about how pleased they were with their own preparations).
In other words, the students who were more self-confident tended to be less self-focused and less self-critical in the way they spoke to themselves, and when they were self-focused, this tended to be with a positive bias.
This study assumes people are able to remember and recognise their own past self-talk, which some readers may question. Of course, it's also just as likely that anxiety triggers particular categories of self-talk, as it is that the wrong kind of self-talk fuels anxiety. Nonetheless, the researchers said their insights could help inform interventions aimed at helping people overcome fear of public speaking.
"As we know that high public-speaking-anxiety individuals engage in higher levels of self-critical and social-assessing self-talk than low anxiety individuals," Shi's team concluded, "instructors can intervene in the early phases of the speech preparation process by helping these students to attend to, recognise, and adjust the frequency and nature of their self-talk."
_________________________________
Shi, X., Brinthaupt, T., & McCree, M. (2015). The relationship of self-talk frequency to communication apprehension and public speaking anxiety Personality and Individual Differences, 75, 125-129 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2014.11.023
--further reading--
Self-motivation: How "You can do it!" beats "I can do it!"
What are elite cricket batsmen saying when they talk to themselves?
The science of how we talk to ourselves in our heads
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Your Anxiety During Public Speaking Is Probably Made Worse By The Audience Members You Look At
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- Women's Memories Are More Speech-filled Than Men's
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Neuroscience
What do confident people say to themselves before giving a speech?
Xiaowei Shi and his colleagues surveyed nearly 200 students on a public speaking course. The researchers approached the students after they'd given two public presentations on the course and were soon to give their third. The students answered questions about how much they'd engaged in self-talk in the preceding days, and about how much anxiety they feel towards public speaking.
The women tended to be more nervous than the men. Once this gender influence had been accounted for, the students' frequency of various types of self-talk over the last few days explained 20 per cent of the difference in their anxiety levels. Specifically, the more confident students tended to say they'd engaged in less self-critical self-talk (e.g. chastising themselves about their poor preparations) and less self-talk related to social assessment (e.g. replaying ways people had reacted in the past), whereas they had engaged in more self-talk related to self-reinforcement (e.g. talking to themselves about how pleased they were with their own preparations).
In other words, the students who were more self-confident tended to be less self-focused and less self-critical in the way they spoke to themselves, and when they were self-focused, this tended to be with a positive bias.
This study assumes people are able to remember and recognise their own past self-talk, which some readers may question. Of course, it's also just as likely that anxiety triggers particular categories of self-talk, as it is that the wrong kind of self-talk fuels anxiety. Nonetheless, the researchers said their insights could help inform interventions aimed at helping people overcome fear of public speaking.
"As we know that high public-speaking-anxiety individuals engage in higher levels of self-critical and social-assessing self-talk than low anxiety individuals," Shi's team concluded, "instructors can intervene in the early phases of the speech preparation process by helping these students to attend to, recognise, and adjust the frequency and nature of their self-talk."
_________________________________
Shi, X., Brinthaupt, T., & McCree, M. (2015). The relationship of self-talk frequency to communication apprehension and public speaking anxiety Personality and Individual Differences, 75, 125-129 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2014.11.023
--further reading--
Self-motivation: How "You can do it!" beats "I can do it!"
What are elite cricket batsmen saying when they talk to themselves?
The science of how we talk to ourselves in our heads
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Your Anxiety During Public Speaking Is Probably Made Worse By The Audience Members You Look At
We already know from past research that people with social anxiety seem to have a bias towards negative social signals. For instance, they're more likely to notice a frown of disapproval than a smile, which of course only fuels their anxiety. But...
- Women's Memories Are More Speech-filled Than Men's
To gasps of surprise from some quarters, a spate of recent studies have shown that women don't talk any more than men do. But now Richard Ely and Elizabeth Ryan have looked at people's autobiographical memories and found that while women may not...
- Extra-curricular Librarian
I will be speaking at the Spring 2008 meeting of PVAAL, the Pioneer Valley Association of Academic Librarians, on March 27, 2008. My topic is "The Adjunct Life and other LIS Extra-curricular Activities," and at the talk, I will reflect on my five years...
- Learning Why We Learn: A Call To Action For All Undergraduates
Last month, I attended the CSRES Symposium "Wonder and the Natural World", and I had a chance to listen to a speech by Dr. Richard Gunderman, Professor of Liberal Arts at the IU School of Medicine. (He actually completed an MD-PhD in Philosophy, and...
- Become A Counselor At The Help Center Hotline
Help Center volunteers have been helping fellow students talk about what’s on their mind since 1970. The Help Center is UMD’s Peer Counseling and Crisis Intervention hotline. We’re trained to talk with students on the phone, and in person, about...