Habits, Tics, and Stuttering: Prevalence and Relation to Anxiety and Somatic Awareness

This study examines the prevalence of nervous habits, tics, and stuttering in 256 college students, as well as the relationship between these behaviors and self-reported general anxiety and awareness of bodily sensations. Improving on previous studies, this study strengthens the operational definition of a nervous habit by using a more stringent operational definition, giving what is arguably a more valid set of prevalence statistics. Participants were asked to complete self-report measures of general anxiety and somatic awareness. Relationships were found between number of nervous habits and tics that participants endorsed and their self-reported awareness of bodily sensations, as well as between number of habits endorsed and self-reported general anxiety. This article concludes with suggestions forfuture research in the area of nervous habits and motor tics.