Speech anxiety is a common type of social phobia. Social phobia is a significant and persistent fear of situations involving social interactions or performance--the fear relating to the possibility of embarrassment in those contexts. A person with a phobia about public speaking is likely to fear embarrassing herself during a speech. Speech anxiety may be related to a variety of causes.
Conditioning By Association
Phobias are primarily developed by conditioning. Conditioning by association is the connection of strong, negative emotion, such as fear or anxiety, to a particular situation or object. This then becomes a learned association, and the link between the fear and the situation feels like a reality. For example, a person is giving a speech and suddenly loses his train of thought. As he scrambles to recover, he may feel embarrassed about this slip-up and start to experience heart palpitations and a dry mouth. He might remember this strong anxiety response the next time he is preparing to make a speech, which could trigger that same anxiety response. The fear of losing his train of thought once more, and experiencing the same embarrassment, can be enough to generate great anxiety about giving the speech.
Conditioning By Avoidance
Conditioning by avoidance is another dimension in the development of social phobia. Once conditioning by association is established, a person may strive to avoid public speaking to reduce her anxiety about it. She is then conditioned to associate avoidance of public speaking to reduce anxiety, which strengthens her association between anxiety and public speaking.
Trauma
A traumatic experience can also set the stage for speech anxiety via conditioning. For example, if a person was severely ridiculed as a child about his intellect or the way he talked, the emotional trauma associated with the ridicule and harassment may have become linked in his mind. He may then feel anxious in situations in which his intellect or the way he speaks is highlighted, such as public speaking.
Negative Self-Talk and Beliefs
Self-talk is what people say to themselves as they go through their daily lives. This self-talk can be positive or negative, depending upon a person's beliefs about herself and the world. When self-talk is negative, based upon negative beliefs, anxiety can result. For instance, a person might believe she is incompetent in everything she does. Her self-talk may revolve around this belief, berating herself when she makes even the smallest error. If she is asked to give a speech at work, it may trigger negative self-talk about her competence and skills. This negative self-talk may lead her to feel anxious about the speech because she fears others may question her competence as well.
References
- "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders -- Fourth Edition -- Text Revision"; American Psychiatric Association; 2000
- "The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook"; Edmund J. Bourne, Ph.D.: 1995
