A neurological representation of speech state anxiety: Mapping salivary cortisol levels of public speakers

A Racing Heart, Rattling Knees, and Ruminative Thoughts: Defining, Explaining, and Treating Public Speaking Anxiety

“…Similar to responses to other threatening situations (Knight & Borden, 1979), speaker HR increases as the time for giving a speech approaches and quickly dissipates after performance (Behnke & Carlile, 1971). This inverted v-shaped pattern (see Figure 1) has been replicated with HR (Pörhölä, 1997;Porter, 1974;Porter & Burns, 1973) and other physiological indices (e.g., BP, salivary cortisol; Davidson et al, 2000;Egloff, Wilhelm, Neubauer, Mauss, & Gross, 2002;Roberts et al, 2004). The pattern of physiological arousal is, however, different when speakers are asked to self report their physiological symptoms ; see Figure 1).…”

“…Autonomic nervous system activation is ''associated with fear or anxiety reactions in communication settings'' (Beatty & Dobos, 1997, p. 218), and measures of ANS activity are ''strong responses [that] require relativity simple instrumentation'' (Behnke, 1971, p. 16). 2 Some research does, however, report the use of measures such as brain temperature and activity and salivary cortisol, which are thought to be more direct measures of neural activity (e.g., Behnke, Beatty, & Dabbs, 1982;Davidson, Marshall, Tomarken, & Henriques, 2000;Roberts, Sawyer, & Behnke, 2004).…”

Fallacies in the Textual Analysis of the Communibiological Literature

“…Our early writing made it clear that we were joining a movement that was already in progress under the rubrics of psychobiology, temperament, and cognitive neuroscience (e.g., . In the past few years, however, communication scholars have begun to examine salivatory cortisol as an index of speech anxiety (Roberts, Sawyer, & Behnke, 2004), measure endocrine levels in the interpersonal context (Floyd, 2004), and conduct functional magnetic resonance studies (Weber, Ritterfeld, & Mathiak, 2004). These are truly groundbreaking studies.…”

Anticipatory Speech Anxiety as a Function of Public Speaking Assignment Type An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2005 convention of the National Communication Association in Boston

“…Using this narrowbanded scale, respondents focus their attention on a particular milestone while responding to anxiety scale items. This procedure has been successfully utilized and well described in various communication studies (King & Behnke, 2005;Young, Behnke, & Mann, 2004), and particularly in public speaking studies (Behnke & Sawyer, 2001;Roberts, Sawyer, & Behnke, 2004). This narrowbanding procedure, applied to the Spielberger STAI scales, was deemed the most appropriate measurement strategy for the present research.…”