Cued self-awareness and speech fluency

Abstract

The present study investigated the potential influence of cued attention to self on speaking behavior. Forty-five undergraduate participants completed three tasks: watching a movie clip, telling a story, and completing button-pressing tasks, including a cognitive Stroop-like task. Each task was presented to participants in the presence and absence of video of their own behavior. During each task, indicators of autonomic arousal were acquired, including skin conductance and heart rate. Results showed that autonomic arousal was greater during speaking than movie-watching, and Stroop compared to baseline tasks. The presence of the video resulted in reduced performance, as marked by a greater frequency of speech disfluencies during speaking and increased reaction time during button-pressing tasks. However, the presence of the video was not associated with greater autonomic arousal. Results indicate that cued attention to self can lead to performance decrements, but not increases in autonomic arousal.

Keywords:

• Speech
• Fluency
• Arousal
• Behavior
• Performance
• Physiology

ORCID

Anthony P. Buhr http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9370-2332

Joshua C. Eyer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1668-6268

Notes

1 For the lme4 package, the null distribution is a t-distribution showing a t-statistic, approximated by the regression parameter (estimate) divided by the standard error (SE) of the estimate. Bates et al. (2015) state that degrees of freedom can be problematic for models with random factors, and therefore must be approximated. Bates et al. also argue that mixed effects models are not conducive to computing effect sizes. Rather, we tested a hypothesis and reported the p-value, which a statistical consultant advised was sufficient for reporting results from hypothesis testing.