BC, Canada Mary Rose L.

On Friday, I mentioned I could summarize an article for the Canadian Stuttering Association website. I'm thankful to God that I was able to decipher the key points from all the jargon. I just sent if off for the rest of the boards review. Here's the summary.

Personality and Stuttering 

Summarized by Mary Rose L.

The Correlational Study:

The study examined the relationship of the 5 factor Model of Personality - specifically Neuroticism, Extraversion and its impact on the stutterer's quality of life. 

The researcher hypothesized that higher Neuroticism scores would correlate with higher scores in OASES (Overall  Assessment of the Speakers Experience of  Stuttering)  which indicate greater negative effects - anxiety, shame and avoidance.  However, if stutterers had higher Extraversion scores, then they may deal with life stressors in a direct way via seeking support from others.

Materials and Method:

The 5 factor Model of Personality is comprised of Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Concientiousness and Aggreeableness.  Neuroticism is defined as being moody, emotional, unstable and anxious. It is also linked to the experience of negative emotionality and impaired coping with daily stressors ( Costa & McCrae, 1992).  Extraversion is defined as being outgoing and social.  Due to previous  literature on Openness, Concientiousness and Agreeableness, the researcher decided not to study these variables  (Bleeka, Reutera, Yaruss, Cook, Fabere, Christian & Montaga, 2012).

Participants - 112 German people who stutter (PWS). They were recruited from a Self Help Support Group for Stutterers. Each participants met the required criterias 1) they were over 18 years  of age; 2) they had a developmental stutter before 10 years of age; and  3) their stutter was confirmed by a Speech Language Pathologist. 

Questionnaire - participants completed a 100 item self report that measured  the pychosocial effects of a stutterers everyday life called OASES (Overall Assessment of the Speakers Experience of Stuttering) .  

Results: The research findings supported the hypothesis of a relationship with Neuroticism and OASES scores. A person with a higher level of Neuroticism exhibited a higher score in OASES. This reflected an adverse experience due to their speech disorder. For this reason, it is important for clinicians and researchers to consider these negative psychosocial consequences in the assessment of individuals who stutter. For PWS, there was a negative correlation in extraversion which suggest that  stutterers are less outgoing and experience greater adverse impacts resulting from their stuttering or vice versa. Only 4 % of stutterers were found to be extraverted and this explained the variation in the neuroticism results (Bleeka, et al., 2012).

Discussion: It is likely that persons with high neuroticism will benefit from emotion regulation strategies in the context of coping. However, future studies are needed to investigate the link between Neuroticsim and speech therapy. Due to the correlational nature of the present study it is not possible to derive a causal relationship between Neuroticism and the stuttering impact on quality of life (Bleeka, et al., 2012).

References:

Bleeka, B. , Reutera, M., Yaruss J.S., Cook, S., Fabere, J., & Montaga, C. (2012). Relationship between personality characteristics of people who stutter and the impact of stuttering on everyday life. Journal of Fluency Disorder,  37, 325 - 333.

Costa, P.T.,  & McCrae, R.R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) and NEO Five - Factor Inventory (FFI): Professional manual. Odessa. Psychological Assessment Resources.