The present study was designed to investigate a possible relationship between "recursive anxiety" and paradoxical intention. Groups of subjects were chosen from among individuals with public speaking concerns. and for whom fear of fear or recursive anxiety clearly represented an important element, or was completely absent from the clinical profile. These subjects were offered a standard in vivo...

This paper explores gender differences in the evaluation of male and female speakers’ affective features in public speaking. We analyzed 260 two-minute behavioral videos (200 of females and 60 of males), collected from an online public speaking practice tool. We adopted a linear regression model that utilized facial and prosodic features, including facial action units (AU), word count, pitch, a...

The current study aimed to extend the evaluation of the utility of the Social Performance Rating Scale (SPRS) [Behav. Res. Ther. 36 (1998) 995]. We examined the utility of a modified SPRS for the behavioral assessment of public-speaking anxiety among patients with social phobia (n = 49). The videotaped performance of public-speaking fearful patients in a public-speaking task was rated using fou...

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the development of treatments to help people reduce their public speaking anxiety (PSA) in a variety of circumstances. A review of literature suggests that several treatments have been found to be effective in reducing communication apprehension. However, it has not been determined whether Virtual Reality Therapy (VRT) has proven to be as...

Public speaking performances are not only characterized by the presentation of the content, but also by the presenters’ nonverbal behavior, such as gestures, tone of voice, vocal variety, and facial expressions. Within this work, we seek to identify automatic nonverbal behavior descriptors that correlate with expert-assessments of behaviors characteristic of good and bad public speaking perform...