A negative halo effect for stuttering? The consequences of stuttering for romantic desirability are mediated by perceptions of personality traits, self-esteem, and intelligence

ABSTRACT

Stuttering is a disorder in oral communication that is often accompanied by negative stereotypes and social stigma. The primary goal of the present study was to examine whether opposite-sex perceivers rated the romantic desirability of targets who stuttered differently than targets who did not stutter. We were also interested in examining whether perceptions of the target (i.e., extraversion, emotional stability, self-esteem, and intelligence) would mediate the associations between stuttering and romantic desirability in a zero-acquaintance situation. Results showed that targets who stuttered were perceived to be less romantically desirable than targets who did not stutter. Further, the negative association between stuttering and romantic desirability was mediated by the perceived extraversion, self-esteem, and intelligence of the targets. Discussion will focus on the implications of these results for the understanding of the negative halo effect for stuttering.

KEYWORDS:

• Stuttering
• halo effect
• personality
• self-esteem
• romantic desirability

Acknowlegement

We would like to acknowledge Lidor Biton and Ariel Ohana, the research assistants of Sapir Academic College, Israel, for their valuable assistance with the data collection. Grateful thanks are also extended to all those who participated so willingly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We also administered the other subscales from the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (i.e., conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness) but we did not include them in the present analyses because we did not have hypotheses for those personality dimensions. Additional analyses that include those personality dimensions are available from the first author upon request. Participants also completed a self-report version of the HEXACO-60 (Ashton & Lee, 2009) which measured the honesty-humility, emotionality, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience of the participant rather than the target.