The Ratio of Personal and Reactive Anxiety in the Psychological Status of Stuttering Patients

Introduction. The article is devoted to the problem of studying the psychological characteristics of patients with stuttering. A theoretical review of classical and modern approaches to the study of the personality of stammerers and their social and communication skills is presented. The results of an experimental study determining the relationship between social and communicative abilities and indicators of personal and reactive anxiety of stuttering patients are presented. The significance of the results obtained for building and implementing the work of an interdisciplinary team of specialists is determined.Materials and Methods. The following methods were used when writing the article: theoretical analysis of domestic and foreign literature sources; generalization and systematization of the results of studying the personal sphere of stuttering patients; experimental methods for studying the socio-communicative and psychological characteristics of patients with stuttering; methods of statistical processing of experimental data.Results. A variety of approaches to the study of personal characteristics of persons with stuttering is considered. In the course of studying the literature sources, the relationship between the state of the emotional and personal sphere and the communicative and speech capabilities of patients with stuttering was revealed, which was later confirmed when analyzing the results of the empirical part of the study. Data analysis showed that the level of social anxiety and fear of negative evaluation (the severity of social phobia) in patients with stuttering is several times higher than normal and correlates with the rigidity of fixation on a speech defect. The study revealed invariant and variable components in the structure of social and communicative maladaptation of patients with stuttering. Among the invariant components, we attributed the presence of high social anxiety (social distress, avoidance, and fear of negative evaluation) in combination with a maladaptive system of social attitudes characteristic of most stutterers. Variable components include individual characteristics of situational anxiety and socio-psychological characteristics of difficult communication, which are personalized.Discussion and Conclusions. The conducted study allowed to conclude that the difficulties and peculiarities of socio-communicative functioning of patients with stuttering need to determine the design of hierarchically structured pedagogical model of speech therapy effects that take into account the fixed and variable components in the structure of socio-communicative maladjustment and differentiate rehabilitative effect in the context of algorithmizing and personalized approach to speech therapy.