Higher anxiety rating does not mean poor speech performance: dissociation of the neural mechanisms of anticipation and delivery of public speaking

Public speaking anxiety refers to feelings of nervousness when anticipating or delivering a speech. However, the relationship between anxiety in the anticipation phase and speech delivery phase is unclear. In this study, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy to record participants’ brain activities when they were anticipating or performing public speaking tasks in an immersive virtual reality environment. Neuroimaging results showed that participants’ subjective ratings of public anxiety in the anticipation phase but not the delivery phase were correlated with activities in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the inferior frontal gyrus, and the precentral and postcentral gyrus. In contrast, their speaking performance could be predicted by activities in the temporal gyrus and the right postcentral gyrus in the delivery phase. This suggests a dissociation in the neural mechanisms between anxiety in preparation and execution of a speech. The conventional anxiety questionnaire is a good predictor of anticipatory anxiety, but cannot predict speaking performance. Using virtual reality to establish a situational test could be a better approach to assess in vivo public speaking performance.