Public Speaking Anxiety

The investigators are conducting a clinical trial of therapy for public speaking anxiety. There are many eligibility criteria, but the main ones are that participants need to be socially anxious and have public speaking anxiety. In this clinical trial, all participants will do exposure therapy. Before doing exposure therapy in the study, though, participants will be randomized to do one of two treatments: i) a positive mood treatment, which is designed to increase how positive people feel, and ii) a relaxation treatment, which is designed to help people feel more relaxed. The investigators are doing this study to see whether doing the positive mood treatment or relaxation treatment first will affect how well exposure therapy works.

Public Speaking Anxiety (PSA) is a common manifestation of social anxiety among university students that can negatively impact academic performance and psychological well-being. Virtual Reality (VR) based interventions combined with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) represent a promising approach to address PSA by enabling controlled, gradual exposure to feared social situations through realistic simulations of audiences and settings. This randomized controlled trial will evaluate whether integrating VR sessions into standard psychological counseling provided by the University Psychological Counseling Service (UPCS) improves anxiety and PSA outcomes in university students compared with counseling alone. Participants will be randomized to one of two groups: (1) a control group receiving standard psychological counseling intervention, or (2) an experimental group receiving psychological counseling supplemented with VR interventions delivered via immersive 360° video scenarios. The VR-based intervention includes a VR-Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) module offering graded exposure to anxiety-provoking public speaking contexts, and a VR-Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) module aimed at enhancing mindfulness and psychological flexibility through guided experiential exercises. Psychological outcomes and physiological responses recorded during sessions will be analyzed to compare the effectiveness of VR-integrated counseling versus standard counseling alone. This study addresses the limited evidence on CBT combined with 360° video-based VR exposure for PSA in university students and introduces a novel VR-based ERP and ACT protocol tailored to a university counseling setting.

This randomized controlled trial examines whether imagery-based extinction memory updating following a standardized virtual reality (VR) exposure session improves the generalization of exposure effects to novel public speaking contexts. Individuals with elevated public speaking anxiety will complete a single-session VR speech exposure. Participants are randomized to (a) standard mental rehearsal of the exposure experience or (b) mental rehearsal plus guided imagery that updates the extinction memory with novel, non-exposed contexts. Generalization is assessed 7-14 days later using a multi-context behavioral approach test (BAT) in vivo and in VR.

The project aims to assess the feasibility of self-administered training for individuals with public speaking anxiety, specifically targeting the reduction of emotional reasoning bias. It seeks to evaluate the interventions' usability, acceptability, satisfaction and adherence/compliance rates. In addition, the study intends to determine the feasibility of conducting a potential randomised clinical trial to evaluate the true impact of the intervention on emotional reasoning biases and public speaking anxiety levels.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the effects of four versions of a workshop for social anxiety and public speaking stress. All participants are current University of Colorado Boulder undergraduate students. Participation in this research study lasts for approximately 8 weeks, and includes a pre-workshop questionnaire, 3 weekly workshop sessions (ranging from 2 to 3 hours each, including a 5-minute post-session questionnaire), a post-workshop questionnaire, and a 1-month follow-up questionnaire.

The study aims to develop and implement a self-applied online psychological intervention for the correction of Emotional Reasoning bias for people with public speaking anxiety. By comparing the effects of this training for ER biases vs. a non-specific mindfulness intervention, the newly developed intervention is expected to promote a greater reduction in emotional reasoning bias and the severity of symptomatology associated with public speaking anxiety.