SPEECH DISTURBANCES AND GAZE BEHAVIOR DURING PUBLIC SPEAKING IN SUBTYPES OF SOCIAL PHOBIA

Twenty-four social phobics with public speaking anxiety and 25 nonphob ic individuals (controls) gave a speech in front of two people. Subjec tive anxiety, gaze behavior, and speech disturbances were assessed. Ba sed on subjects' fear ratings of social situations, phobics and contro ls were divided into the generalized and nongeneralized subtype. Resul ts showed that generalized phobics reported the most,and nongeneralize d controls the least anxiety during public speaking. All subjects had longer and more frequent eye contact when delivering a speech than whe n talking with an experimenter or sitting in front of an audience. Pho bics showed more filled pauses, had longer silent pauses, paused more frequently, and spent mon time pausing than controls when giving a spe ech. Generalized phobics spent more time pausing during their speech t han the other subgroups (nongeneralized controls, generalized controls , and nongeneralized phobics). These results suggest that generalized phobics tended to shift attentional resources from speech production t o other cognitive tasks. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.