Attention Processes and Social Anxiety in Public Speaking

Abstract

The article attempts to analyze the relationship between attention processes and social anxiety in a situation of public speaking. Theoretical analyzes were based on classical assumptions and current research from the cognitive and cognitive-behavioral paradigm. The study was to initially verify the assumptions resulting from the cognitive model of public speaking. A survey was carried out on a group of 187 students of the Jagiellonian University. Respondents answered six questions concerning subjective sense of anxiety and subjective sense of focusing attention during public speaking. According to our hypotheses, people with high anxiety focus more on themselves, and those with low anxiety focus more on the content of the speech. It seems that both low-anxiety and severely anxious people might focus strongly on the audience, although there are different psychological mechanisms of this direction of attention bias. The results of the research partially confirm the expected directions of the relationship between the subjectively perceived bias in attention and the estimated level of fear of public speaking and are consistent with the theoretical predictions. The results concerning the relationship between the power of anxiety and directing attention to the audience do not provide sufficient grounds for either rejecting or accepting the hypotheses. The results indicate the need to take into account the attention bias in the treatment of anxiety disorders and may constitute an important basis for practical therapeutic work in the cognitive-behavioral paradigm. Moreover, the results indicate the need to take into account the phenomenon of attention bias in counteracting anxiety disorders.