Speaking of Nervous Habits
By: Elizabeth Zeppernick, M.Ed., BCBA, LBA
Public speaking can intimidate even the most confident of speakers! A person’s ability to speak publicly can impact one’s success in professional and academic settings. On the flip side of that, nervous habits can negatively impact communication. Speech disfluencies such as filling pauses with “uh,” “um,” and “like,” can affect the credibility of the speaker (Henderson, 2007). There are behavioral, evidence-based interventions to address these nervous habits including the use of Awareness Training.
Awareness Training assists the participant to recognize vocal and motor behaviors by describing them, learning to detect them and teaching a response that is incompatible with the undesired behavior. There is an existing body of research which has established the success of awareness training in decreasing speech disfluencies, i.e. those non functional stutters and fillers like “um” and “like,” (Montes et al., 2019, 2020; Spieler & Miltenberger, 2017).
Researchers Ortiz et al. (2022) recently published a study titled “Decreasing Nervous Habits During Public Speaking: A Component Analysis of Awareness Training.” Their goal was to assess which aspects of Awareness Training are most effective and to extend previous research by using teleconferencing technology and challenging the participants with novel speech topics.
This study included nine college-age participants who all wished to improve their public speaking skill set. They were screened to ensure they exhibited vocal responses to justify their participation in the study. Screening, training and follow up sessions all occurred using Zoom for all but one participant.
The study and treatment was broken into distinct phases described below:
Baseline
To establish a baseline (measurement of their skills prior to intervention), participants chose between two randomly assigned topics. They had five minutes to prepare an outline for a speech that was three minutes in length. The experimenter recorded the occurrences of undesirable target responses.
Response Description
The experimenter gave a description of the target response, (i.e. the use of “like” as a filler) and modeled what it looks and sounds like. This phase alone, which on average took only one minute to complete, was effective enough to meet the criterion for mastery (75% reduction) for four out of the nine participants.
Response Detection
During this phase, the participants watched one minute clips of their own baseline speech and practiced identifying when it occurred by raising their hand each time they observed the response targeted for reduction. When they failed to identify it, the experimenter made a corrective signal by raising their hand. Video training sessions continued until the participant met criteria for having mastered the detection. They then practiced detecting it during a live, real-time speech by also raising their hand when they heard themselves make the target response. In addition to the four out of nine who mastered in the first phase, this second phase which took between four to 84 minutes total, led to mastery for an additional two of the nine participants.
Competing Response Detection
Only one participant required this supplemental training which entailed replacing the non-functional, filler utterances (“uh,” “um,” “er,” etc) with a silent three second pause. This additional phase of training only took approximately one minute to complete.
In follow-up sessions scheduled two to five weeks after the completion of initial training, eight of the nine participants demonstrated rates of target behaviors that were still low enough to be considered effectively reduced. When assessed for their ability to generalize the new public speaking skills to a novel environment with new audience members, five out of the eight participants were successful.
Researchers conducted a post-study questionnaire, and participants rated the treatment and outcomes favorably. Findings of this study are not just relevant for those who are in positions to speak to large audiences. Undesirable motor and vocal responses can negatively impact communication even in intimate one-to-one settings. Thankfully, there are evidence-based, behavioral interventions like Awareness Training, designed to improve speaking skills.
Sources:
Henderson, J. (2007). There’s no such thing as public speaking: Making any presentation or speech as persuasive as a one-on-one conversation. Prentice Hall Press.
Montes, C. C., Heinicke, M. R., & Geierman, D. M. (2019). Awareness training reduces college students’ speech disfluencies in public speaking. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 52(3), 746-755. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.569
Montes, C. C., Heinicke, M. R., Geierman, D. M., & Morales, E. (2020). A component analysis of awareness training for reducing speech disfluencies. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. 54(2), 770-782. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.795
Ortiz, S.M., Deshais, M.A., Miltenberger, R.G. and Reeve, K.F. (2022), Decreasing nervous habits during public speaking: A component analysis of awareness training. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 55: 230-248. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.882
Spieler, C., & Miltenberger, R. (2017). Using awareness training to decrease nervous habits during public speaking. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 50(1), 38-47. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.362
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