The relationship between communication attitude and emotion of children who stutter

Mal-attitude and negative emotion specific to speech are known to correlate with severity among children who stutter. To determine if speech-associated mal-attitude and negative emotion also covary with each other, 143 grade-school children who stutter were administered Brutten's Communication Attitude Test (CAT). Then, independently, they also ranked their emotional reaction to those items of the CAT that had led them to report mal-attitude. The results revealed the existence of a statistically significant correlation of .89 between mal-attitude and negative emotion. Moreover, both speech-associated mal-attitude and negative emotion increased to a statistically significant extent with age and stuttering severity. These data highlight the importance of early detection and intervention as it relates to the cognitive and affective components of the stuttering syndrome. Educational Objectives: The reader will learn and be able to describe the relationship between school-age children's (1) stuttering and their mal-attitudes toward speech, (2) Their mal-attitudes and negative emotional reactions to speaking, and (3) the charges that occur in stuttering severity, mal-attitudes and negative emotional reactions between ages 7 and 13 years.