Anxiety and Cognitive Bias in Children and Young People who Stutter

Cognitive bias and stuttering in adolescence

“…Taken together, the findings suggest that neither having a diagnosis of stuttering nor degree of stuttering severity (for aWS only) influenced how adolescents interpreted ambiguous social scenarios. Several researchers have speculated that there is a link between stuttering and interpretation bias (Iverach et al, 2017;Mancinelli, 2018;Mcallister et al, 2015;K. A. Smith et al, 2014), but the present findings did not support this hypothesis.…”

“…Regarding attentional bias differences, the findings of the present study generally echo previous research in this area that demonstrated greater attentional allocation towards negative social cues among aWS who were socially anxious (Mcallister et al, 2015) and anxious adults who stutter (Beita-Zuk, 2013;Hennessey et al, 2014;Lowe et al, 2012;van Lieshout et al, 2014). However, it challenges the findings of one study that used a traditional dot-probe paradigm with adults who stutter which did not show any group differences in attentional bias scores (Lowe et al, 2016), although there were significant methodological limitations of that study.…”

“…To date, there have been six studies examining attentional biases among people who stutterfive among adults who stutter (Beita-Zuk, 2013;Hennessey et al, 2014;Lowe et al, 2012Lowe et al, , 2016 and one among children and adolescents who stutter (Mcallister et al, 2015).…”

“…The dot-probe task has been used once with younger speakers who stutter (Mcallister et al, 2015). In their sample of treatment seeking 8-to 18-year-olds who stutter, facial images including schematic line drawings of neutral, happy, angry, and sad faces were presented in pairs.…”

“…Given the frequent negative social experiences that aWS endure, the neurocognitive changes of puberty that likely make them highly sensitive to those experiences, and the fact that social anxiety typically emerges around 13 years of age (Kessler et al, 2005), it is critically important to investigate the cognitive processes that promote the development of social anxiety in the stuttering population. To date, there has been only one study of cognitive bias among aWS which showed that anxious aWS demonstrated an attentional bias towards negative schematic faces (Mcallister, Kelman, & Millard, 2015). There is a great need to advance this preliminary work to strengthen our understanding of the psychosocial mechanism(s) that elicits social anxiety.…”