Interpersonal trust in the communication process is denned as reliance upon the communication of another person in order to achieve a desired but uncertain objective in a risky situation. A theory of the dimensions of interpersonal trust in communication is presented. Experimental studies of ethos and factor-analytic studies of source credibility support the hypothesis that interpersonal trust is based upon a listener's perceptions of a speaker's expertness, reliability, intentions, activeness, personal attractiveness, and the majority opinion of the listener's associates.

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This paper describes a program of group counseling for speech anxiety (sometimes called "stage fright") which is based upon theory and research in the general area of group counseling and therapy. The suggested approach is supported by a rationale based upon existing research on the problem of speech anxiety.

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Univetsi(g of KansasEastern New Mexico Unwerdy PROBLEM This study focuses on self-perceived speech anxiety as reported by students on an introspective measuring device. Self-perceived speech anxiety is defined as a score on the Dickens, Gibson, and Prall'l) short form of the Personal Report on Confidence as a Speaker (PRCS) originally developed by Gilkinson@).There is particular interest a t The University of Kansas on the effect of a course in the fundamentals of speech on the speaking confidence of students. This consideration is the first objective of the present study. Several studies have attacked this problem, but only one has carefully measured self-perceived speech anxiety before and after participation in a college course in speech. Paulson(5) found a significant increase in confidence as measured by Gilkinson's 104 item PRCS for 271 students enrolled in the basic course at the University of Minnesota.A second objective is to report exploratory work involving the use of group counseling procedure as a remedy for self-perceived speech anxiety.I. REPLICATION OF PAULSON'S STUDY On the first day of class, freshmen and sophomore men and women enrolled in 12 sections of Fundamentals of Speech (Speech I) a t The University of Kansas were given an assignment sheet for a 2-minute autobiographical talk to begin the 2nd or 3rd day of class. The instructors were given instructions outlining the procedure to bring about the most uniformity possible under the circumstances.On the 2nd or 3rd day of class, the students gave their speeches in alphabetical order. Immediately after speaking, they were given the Gibson-Prall short form of the PRCS to fill in and return to their instructors the next class period. They were also asked to give their age, sex, and college classification. At the end of the semester, the students again were given the PRCS following their last speech of the semester. Pre and post scores were received for 177 students.The Dickens-Gibson-Prall short form of Gilkinson's Personal Report on Confidence as a Speaker (PRCS) consists of a graphic rating scale of five degrees of speech anxiety, a checklist of descriptive terms, and a list of 50 descriptive statements to which the subjects respond, "yes", "no", or "?".Gilkinson's original PRCS was devised as a measure of the degree of confidence a student feels before and after a specific speaking situation. Gilkinson(8) reported the odd-even reliability coefficient to be .93 for the PRCS scores for 420 speech fundamentals students. After 4 months of speech training, the retest reliability coefficient was .60. PRCS scores correlated .72 with students' self-ratings on confidence, -.69 with fear scores based on a checklist of descriptive terms, .39 with ratings by teachers on general effectiveness, and .41 with ratings by students.Dickens, Gibson and Prall(l) shortened Gilkinson's list of 104 items to 25 "fear" items and 25 "confidence" items. They chose those items whose "yesJ' responses correlated most significantly with the original scores, producing an r o...