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Abstract
Recent studies on the anxiety patterns of public speakers have generally supported perspectives on emotion from the field of neurobiology. Without relying on highly invasive or cumbersome technology, much of the biology of speech anxiety has been derived from heart rate studies of physiological arousal rather than examining more direct evidence provided by neurological activity. The neuroendocrine hormone cortisol is produced by the brain during state anxiety and, in the present study, cortisol levels of public speakers are mapped over time. The resulting pattern for cortisol response is a monotonic decelerating function over time. Moreover, these cortisol levels are related to psychological measures of speaker state anxiety. The implications of these findings are discussed and suggestions for future research are provided.