Calmer Each Time: How Repeated Speaking Lowers Public Speaking Anxiety

By Noam Shemla · The Studies

TL;DR Fear of speaking is not one feeling but a curve: it rises as the talk approaches, peaks just before it, and usually starts to fall once the speaker is underway. Amber Finn, Chris Sawyer and Paul Schrodt, at Texas Christian University, tested whether speaking again and again to an audience, briefly and repeatedly, turns that fall within a talk into lower anxiety from one talk to the next. With 140 students in a required speech course, the results fitted the theory that repeated exposure lets fear subside.

  • Paper: Finn, A. N., Sawyer, C. R., & Schrodt, P. (2009). Examining the effect of exposure therapy on public speaking state anxiety. Communication Education, 58(1), 92–109.
  • Participants: 140 undergraduates in a required speech performance course.
  • Design: A quasi-experiment: the course’s lab sections served as intact groups, some given brief, repeated exposure to an audience.
  • Companion: Finn, A. N., Sawyer, C. R., & Behnke, R. R. (2009). A model of anxious arousal for public speaking. Communication Education, 58(3), 417–432.
  • Access: Both papers are subscription-only. This summary rests on their published abstracts and on the earlier and later studies they build on or that tested the same idea.

Almost everyone who teaches public speaking says the same thing: it gets easier with practice. Amber Finn and colleagues, in a research programme at Texas Christian University, set out to test why, using a theory borrowed from the treatment of phobias.1

The shape of speaking fear

The group had already mapped how a speaker’s anxiety moves over time. Before the talk, it follows a V: high when the assignment is announced, lowest while preparing, and highest of all just before speaking.2 During the talk, two things matter most: how sharply anxiety jumps from rest to the first moment of speaking (sensitisation), and how quickly it falls in the first minute (early habituation).

In the 2004 study, those two moments at the start of a talk together accounted for most of how anxious students felt overall while speaking.3

Exposure: letting fear fall, again and again

The theory the 2009 study tested comes from clinical psychology. Emotional processing theory, developed by Edna Foa and colleagues, holds that fear diminishes when a person stays in the feared situation long enough for the fear to fall on its own, and that repeated falls within sessions add up to lower fear across sessions.

Finn and colleagues applied it to the speech classroom. Speakers were already known to calm down during a talk; the question was whether brief, repeated turns in front of an audience would carry that calming from one speech to the next. The researchers compared lab sections of a required speaking course, 140 students in all, some of which were given brief repeated exposure to audiences. The results, they reported, were generally consistent with emotional processing theory.

Who panics

The companion paper, published the same year, asked a different question: what makes some students panic when they have to speak? It introduced a specific kind of speaking anxiety, anxious arousal, and found that two traits students bring to the room, their general anxiety and how strongly their body reacts to stress, together accounted for 73.3% of the anxious arousal they felt during a presentation.4 Practice changes the curve, in other words, but people start from different places on it.

Has it held up?

The core idea, that speaking fear falls across repeated speeches, has been observed with more direct measurement since. In a small study using virtual reality, 19 adults each gave three short speeches in a row to a virtual audience, rating their distress and wearing a heart-rate monitor.5

The drop is the part that matters, so here it is as differences, with the uncertainty the authors reported around each.

That is the between-talk pattern Finn and colleagues were looking for, though, notably, this study did not find the within-talk fall that the theory says produces it. The small sample and the virtual audience limit how far it can be pushed.

What this study cannot tell you

  • Its numbers. Both 2009 papers are subscription-only, and their abstracts do not report effect sizes for the exposure comparison.
  • Whether exposure caused the change. The design compared whole lab sections, not randomly assigned individuals, so sections may have differed in other ways.
  • How much exposure is enough. The abstract does not say how many exposures, or how long each was.
  • Whether it helps people with clinical anxiety. The participants were students in a required course.

What a speaker can take from it

Two findings from this programme are worth carrying. The worst moment is usually just before you start, and the first minute is where anxiety is most likely to turn. That argues for knowing the opening cold, so the first minute runs without effort while the fear peaks and begins to fall.

And practice works best as real practice: speaking out loud, in front of people, more than once, and staying in it long enough for the fear to come down. Reading your notes silently does not produce the fall; standing up and giving the talk does.

This article summarises two subscription-only papers from their published abstracts, along with the abstracts of the group’s earlier studies. The virtual-reality results are the full-text figures of Takac et al. (2019). The curve and the equation describe the earlier findings as their abstracts state them.

Measured

  • Students’ state anxiety before and during speeches, in a required speaking course
  • Trait anxiety and physiological reactivity (companion study)

Inferred, not measured

  • That repeated exposure lowered anxiety across speeches: a quasi-experiment comparing intact lab sections
  • That within-talk habituation drives it: the theory tested, not directly shown in the later VR study

References

  1. Finn, A. N., Sawyer, C. R., & Schrodt, P. (2009). Examining the effect of exposure therapy on public speaking state anxiety. Communication Education, 58(1), 92–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634520802450549
  2. Behnke, R. R., & Sawyer, C. R. (1999). Milestones of anticipatory public speaking anxiety. Communication Education, 48(2), 165–172. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634529909379164
  3. Behnke, R. R., & Sawyer, C. R. (2004). Public speaking anxiety as a function of sensitization and habituation processes. Communication Education, 53(2), 164–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634520410001682429
  4. Finn, A. N., Sawyer, C. R., & Behnke, R. R. (2009). A model of anxious arousal for public speaking. Communication Education, 58(3), 417–432. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634520802268891
  5. Takac, M., Collett, J., Blom, K. J., Conduit, R., Rehm, I., & De Foe, A. (2019). Public speaking anxiety decreases within repeated virtual reality training sessions. PLOS ONE, 14(5), e0216288. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0216288