The Impact Of Emotional Processes On Stuttering In Young School-Age Children Who Do And Do Not Stutter

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences in emotional processes (emotional reactivity and emotional regulation) between children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS). In addition, we attempted to explore whether positive or negative emotion-eliciting conditions increase stuttering in CWS and CWNS. Methods: Twelve young school-age CWS and thirteen young school-age CWNS participated in this research. The Korean version of the Children's Behavior Questionnaire Short Form (CBQ-SF) was employed to investigate the characteristics of children's emotional processes (i.e., three factors: Surgency, Negative Affectivity, & Effortful control). Each participant completed a series of tasks that were designed to elicit emotions such as neutral, anxiety, pleasure, and frustration. After each task, the participant was asked to tell a story based on a wordless picture book. Results: Findings indicated (1) no significant differences in the three factors of emotional processes between CWS and CWNS; (2) no significant correlations between the three factors of emotional processes and speech disfluency rates (i.e., other disfluencies, OD and stuttering-like disfluencies, SLD) in CWS and CWNS; and (3) a significant difference in SLD between the frustration and neutral conditions for CWS but not for CWNS. Conclusion: The findings from this study suggest that although CWS are not necessarily different from CWNS in emotional reactivity and regulation, CWS's speech system seems to be vulnerable to a frustrating situation and their speech fluency is more likely to be disrupted by the frustrating emotion.