Helping Children Handle Stress, Emotions May Help Stuttering

Fall 2006, Ideas in Action

Children who stutter often face greater challenges managing their behavior and emotions than other children, researchers have found, offering new insight into how to help these children in a more holistic way.

“Our findings indicate that young children who stutter are more apt to be emotionally aroused, less able to settle down once aroused and less able to control their attention and emotion during everyday stressful or challenging situations,” psychologist Tedra Walden, a co-author of the research, said.

“Stuttering, as it continues, can impact a child’s academic, emotional, social, and vocational potential and development. Therefore, if we know more about how emotions influence stuttering and then use this information to more effectively treat early childhood stuttering, we should be in a better position to decrease the long-term negative effects of stuttering in children as they get older,” she continued.

Edward G. Conture, a co-author of the research and director of graduate studies in the Vanderbilt Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, said, “These new findings tell us that when parents tell clinicians, for example, that excitement increases their child’s stuttering, clinicians should try to see how and when certain emotional states increase or maintain the child’s stuttering.”

In addition to Walden and Conture, the research team included Vanderbilt researchers Jan Karrass, first author of the research, Corrin Graham, Hayley Arnold, Kia Hartfield, and Krista Schwenk. The research is in press at the Journal of Communication Disorders.

The researchers used a standardized test of emotions, surveying the parents of 65 3- to 5-year-old children who stutter and 56 children of the same age who do not. The parents filled out a 100-question survey designed to determine how the children react to emotional events and how well they are able to control these emotions. The children participated in two laboratory tests to gauge their language use and speech abilities to ensure that the only speech-language difference between children who do and do not stutter, at least for this study, was restricted to stuttering.

The researchers found three primary differences between young children who stutter and those who do not. The children who stutter were more emotionally aroused by everyday stressful or challenging situations than their non-stuttering peers. It took these children a longer time to settle down once they had become aroused. And, the children who stuttered were less able to control their attention and were more likely to become fixated on a distraction.

The authors also found that the degree to which children who stutter are able to regulate their emotions, combined with how strongly they react to upsetting or exciting situations, played a role in the frequency, duration, and severity of instances of stuttering.

“Our findings seem to indicate that kids with behavioral and emotional issues are at greater risk of stuttering, that not all aspects of their emotional reactions can be blamed on stuttering, and some of these reactions may pre-date the onset of stuttering and actually contribute to its onset and development,” Walden said.

Walden is a professor of psychology at Peabody, an investigator in the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development, and a member of the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies.

Conture is a professor of hearing and speech sciences and a Vanderbilt Kennedy Center investigator. He is the author of over 100 articles, books, book chapters, and videos on stuttering.

The research was supported with funds from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, and Vanderbilt University.