OBJECTIVES a) To perform a systematic and meta-analytic review to verify whether the Simulated Public Speaking Task (SPST) leads to a greater increase in self-rated anxiety than in physiological correlates of anxiety; and b) to compare the results obtained with the SPST with an actual public speaking task involving healthy volunteers. METHODS a) The PubMed and ISI Web of Knowledge databases w...

Author Information: Public speaking has always been both a professional and personal interest of mine. My interest began in elementary school with my parents playing cassette tapes of great speakers during long road trips. Those speakers inspired me through their words and I in turn began to desire to inspire others through speech. In high school, I pursued speaking through joining the forensic...

Research was conducted to test the effectiveness of a skills-based program as a method for reducing anxiety during public speaking. Twenty-five Japanese college sophomores were exposed to a systematic approach for developing a presentation that was theoretically linked to mechanisms to reduce communication apprehension (CA). Students gave four presentations that were graded by both teacher and ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES This study sought to reconcile two lines of research. Previous studies have identified a prevalent and causal role of negative imagery in social phobia and public speaking anxiety; others have demonstrated that lateral eye movements during visualisation of imagery reduce its vividness, most likely by loading the visuospatial sketchpad of working memory. It was hypothes...