Coping with speech anxiety: The power of positive thinking

Abstract

This paper reports two studies designed to probe the link between speech anxiety and positive thinking. The first study reconfirms earlier research that speech anxiety is positively correlated with negative thoughts and negatively related to positive thoughts. The second study found that students trained to use visualization reported a higher proportion of positive to negative thoughts and lower speech anxiety during an informative speech than those who were not trained. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of these data.