The school has introduced public speaking anxiety workshops to help students identify censorship triggers and develop strategies for authentic expression.
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It can be easier to identify social anxiety within adults because they tend to shy away from any social situation and keep to themselves. Common adult forms of social anxiety include performance anxiety, public speaking anxiety, stage fright, and timidness. All of these may also assume clinical forms, i.e., become anxiety disorders (see below).
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According to research done at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, speech anxiety is generally the feeling of nervousness, dread and concern along with a feeling of discomfort. It has been estimated that 75% of all people experience some degree of anxiety/nervousness when it comes to public speaking. If untreated, public speaking anxiety can lead to serious detrimental effects on one's quality of life, career goals and other areas. For example, educational goals requiring public speaking might be left unaccomplished.
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The speaker may be comfortable if they speak in front of a group of complete strangers, but when it comes to speaking in front of family/friends, their anxiety skyrockets, and vice versa. Some speakers are more comfortable in larger groups, and some are more comfortable speaking to smaller groups. Public speaking anxiety arises from the students fear of embarrassment in front of a crowd of people in an unfamiliar situation. Students have a fear of making mistakes or messing up or just being judged in general by their audience.
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Often VR is used as exposure therapy in conjunction with Cognitive Behavior Therapy, CBT, to treat public speaking anxiety. Drug Therapies and meditation have also been successful in treating CA. SSRI’s have been found to be successful treatment for speech anxiety. SSRI’s are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors which are used to treat depression and anxiety and that is why they are an option to treat speech anxiety. Vitamin C has also been shown to lessen the anxiety from CA. The results of a study indicated a possible role of vitamin C in decreasing the physiological signs of stress.
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Most perceptions of heartbeat sensations usually occur during a time of homeostatic perturbation, such as when the state of the body changes from external or internal influences such as physical exertion or elevated arousal states (e.g., riding a roller coaster, watching a scary movie, public speaking anxiety, or having a panic attack). For this reason, cardiac interoception is also sometimes studied by inducing perturbations of bodily state. This can be done pharmacologically using adrenaline-like drugs, such as isoproterenol, which mimics activation of the sympathetic nervous system, resulting in increased heart rate and respiration rate, similar to the “fight-or-flight” response.
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However, not all persons with public speaking anxiety are necessarily unable to achieve work goals, though this disorder becomes problematic when it prevents an individual from attaining or pursuing a goal they might otherwise have – were it not for their anxiety. A recent study conducted by Garcia-Lopez, Diez-Bedmar, and Almansa- Moreno (2013) has reported that previously trained students could act as trainers to other students and help them to improve their public speaking skills. As Garcia-Lopez (2013) has noted, symptoms can include acute hearing, increased heart rate and blood pressure, dilated pupils, increased perspiration and oxygen intake, stiffening of neck/upper back muscles, and dry mouth. Uncontrollable shaking is also common and often occurs prior to the phobia-eliciting stimulus.
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A small body of work has begun to look at affect labeling's potential as a clinical treatment in conjunction with exposure therapy for phobias, anxiety disorders, and other stress disorders. One study found that subjects with high public speaking anxiety who chose from a set of predetermined emotion words to describe their feelings before giving a speech in front of an audience showed greater reductions in anxiety, quantified by physiological responses such as heart rate, than subjects who performed a control, shape-matching, task before giving their speeches. These results suggest that combining affect labeling with an exposure treatment is more effective than exposure alone. Notably, the affect labeling and control conditions found no difference in self-reported anxiety; however, physiological responses characteristic of anxiety were reduced for the subjects who performed the affect labeling.
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