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Conquering the Stage: The Psychology of Public Speaking

I won’t say that I’m an expert at public speaking, but I absolutely love it. It’s one of those rare times where the energy that you give to an audience you get back 10 fold. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, most of my early memories of public speaking were terrifying, usually with my head buried in tiny 3x5 index cards. So I’m always interested in learning ways to improve my public speaking.

What can psychology tell us about what makes an engaging speaker and how can it make us more courageous when we speak? And read on to see my one hack to calm stage fright (fun fact: most social psych labs induce a stress response through the Trier Social Stress Test which makes you public speak and then do mental subtraction in front of a room of disapproving judges).

SO WHAT DO WE KNOW?

Why is it important to focus on speaking?

The art of public speaking goes beyond delivering a message. As with storytelling, an effective speaker has the power to transmit emotions, create a connection, and influence their audience. Charismatic speakers can convey passion, commitment, and confidence in their delivery through emotional contagion — the ability for audiences to “catch” the emotions of those they are listening to. We know that with storytelling, the emotional journey is what audiences usually remember most. But unlike the personality trait of “charisma”, “charismatic speaking” can be learned by anyone — it is a way of training your voice.

What acoustic cues signal a charismatic speaker?

There are a lot of cues that people look for — the content of your message and your presentation (your appearance, your posture, your walk, your hand gestures, your voice)… so we could go down a rabbit hole. The one I want to focus on that intrigues me is the elements of one’s voice.

From research on politicians, religious figures, and charismatic CEOs like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, here are a few elements that are associated with charisma:

Acoustic Element and Charismatic quality

The frequency of the speaker’s voice — how high or low a person’s voice is

• Charismatic style: Lower frequencies (although this varies by culture, lower frequencies signal dominance, slightly higher ones signal competence)

The range of that frequency — the range of highs and lows a person uses when they speak

• Charismatic style: Higher frequency range than average

Loudness variability — how one modulates how loud or soft they talk

• Charismatic style: Higher loudness variability than average

Utterance duration — how long or short speech phrases are.

• Charismatic style: Shorter sentences (typically easy to store in short term memory)

Emphatic stress — how someone stresses certain words (either the word, the consonant, or the vowel depending on the language)

• Charismatic style: Higher variability in emphasizing words

Rhythm — the combination on stressed and unstressed words (poets and rappers often play with this aspect)

• Charismatic style: Higher rhythmic variation

Tempo variability — variability in speed

• Charismatic style: Faster speech than normal but not so fast it affects how you enunciate

What shortcut can you use to practice charismatic speaking?

This is a lot to try to adjust manually. One potential shortcut that you can do is think about stories in what I’ll call “emotional beats.” Typically, you will adjust all of these elements when you are conveying an emotion without realizing it. Research has shown that the emotionality surrounding the same sentence is fundamentally different across these acoustic elements. For example, what do people do when they have a juicy secret they want to tell? They lean in, they might speed up at first and lower their voice maybe in a higher tone, “you’ll never believe what I heard!” and then they’ll slow down very deliberately with emphasized pauses, “she. just. got. a. promotion.”

Notice how your voice changes when you’re intrigued, when you’re serious, when you’re excited, when you’re confident. Also notice how your voice changes when you’re unsure, scared, or worried. How do those acoustic elements fluctuate during those times that aren’t present in others?

WHY DOES IT WORK?

Similar to storytelling, is that humans are acutely attuned to change (when they are paying attention). Our brain constantly scans for new things in the environment to assess, if it sees the same thing over and over again, it will mentally tune out (fun fact: if you paralyze the eye muscles and make someone stare at something that isn’t moving, it will actually start to disappear, known as Troxler’s fading. The brain realizes nothing new is happening and just stops processing the information consciously. Kind of like my kids’ whining).

We also are highly attuned to vocal elements to identify people and understand information about them. For instance, we can infer someone’s mood (happy, sad) and intentions (friendly, threatening) through their vocal cues. The cocktail party effect helps you hear your name clearly in a party, but it also helps you isolate a speaker’s voice amongst a lot of other voices. They’ve done studies to show that the brain fires when concentrating on a voice in a room full of voices and appear as if it is only hearing one voice. It silences all the other voices.

The way we play with change to capture attention is captivating to people. I don’t suggest randomly slowing down or speeding up or changing your volume whenever.

A charismatic speaker uses change to emphasize very important points in their story.

• They speed up to signal excitement
• They slow down or pause to make people hang on an important phrase
• They hush their voice to make their audience lean in
• They accentuate their speech on important words or concepts
• They shorten certain sentences to make it easy for people to remember

Use these acoustic cues intentionally and mindfully. Find the “emotional beats” to dictate when you modulate your voice.

BONUS HACK: PUBLIC SPEAKING ANXIETY AND THE POWER OF REFRAMING

1. Stress is in the anticipation but not the doing. An interesting study showed that people became more stressed in preparing a speech but not moreso when giving the speech. It’s in our concern for the ambiguity of the outcome and our resources to prepare that stress us out, but actually giving the speech does not necessarily have the same stressful outcome. Our anticipation causes more stress than the actual event. Remember that.
2. Reframing our physiological response can change our emotional experience. We often think that our physiological reaction is our emotion. What actually constitutes an emotion is a physiological reaction and our interpretation of that physiological reaction*. Our body doesn’t know the difference between fear and excitement — we get to decide which one it is (this is called the two factor theory of emotion).

My high school speech coach taught me something that I would learn in detail in psychology — that those butterflies in your stomach, their sweaty hands, and heart racing — I control what this means. These emotions are present when you’re scared AND when you’re excited.

So whenever someone asks about upcoming speaking events, my response is always, “I’m so excited, I can’t wait.”

Cultural/DEI Caveats

Research has shown that the range of some of these acoustic elements varies by culture. In addition, there is a penalty often to women in these acoustic elements. With the additional layer of culture, many of the discrepancies also are related to gender inequalities in a culture (so some cultures have less of a gender bias than others). This means that women may be more strongly penalized and may not receive the same perceptions of charisma as much as their male counterparts. In addition, those on the Autism Spectrum may have a harder time producing and detecting these acoustic elements (called prosody), although training can significantly help in manually practicing production and detection.

SO WHAT…

Charismatic speaking can be learned. How can we practice?

Take written material first

1. Identify important points you need to land
2. Emotional journey mapping — how do you want your audience to feel at certain points in the speech (emotional beats)? What sentences are most important in conveying those emotions that you want to craft?
3. Play with a range of 2–3 acoustic elements for these emotional points (potentially record yourself)
4. Observe: How do these changes in acoustic elements change the overall tone of what you’re saying?
5. Learn: Link the acoustic change to the tone. Next time you want to create a certain tone, try the acoustic element.

Impromptu practice

1. Take one acoustic element at a time. In everyday conversations or presentations, identify your important points, and modulate only one element (i.e., “I’m going to speed up to bring in energy, and slow down on really important points.”)
2. Observe: Does the element change the tone in the way you expect? How effective is it?
3. Do it again: try this again with another acoustic element

Bring it together

1. As you practice, modulating these elements will become more automatic
2. Be deliberate in using changes at specific times to grab people’s attention, there is no right way, the combination changes the tone and you’ll find what is comfortable to you and what you like using

Remember — you have something interesting to say — you are excited about it

1. Speaking in front of others is difficult — remember that psyching yourself up is the worst and most useless thing for you to do (stress is in the anticipation not the doing!)
2. Your physiology is preparing you for hyperfocus, don’t let your anxiety scramble it. Stress is GOOD when it helps make you super sharp (this is called eustress).

WANT TO LEARN MORE?

Resources for public speaking

• Have an AI evaluate your presentation style (it’s free): https://app.yoodli.ai/ and https://www.poised.com/
• Gallo, C. (2014). Talk like TED: the 9 public speaking secrets of the world’s top minds. Pan Macmillan.

Academic sources

• Niebuhr, O., Brem, A., Michalsky, J., & Neitsch, J. (2020). What makes business speakers sound charismatic? A contrastive acoustic-melodic analysis of Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. Cadernos de Linguística, 1(1), 01–40.
• Dutton, D. G., & Aron, A. P. (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30(4), 510–517.
• Feldman, P. J., Cohen, S., Hamrick, N., & Lepore, S. J. (2004). Psychological stress, appraisal, emotion and cardiovascular response in a public speaking task. Psychology & Health, 19(3), 353–368.
• Gutnyk, A., Niebuhr, O., & Gu, W. (2021, January). Speaker charisma analyzed through the cultural lens. In 2021 12th International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP) (pp. 1–5). IEEE.
• Marshall, G. D., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1979). Affective consequences of inadequately explained physiological arousal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(6), 970–988.
• Paul, R., Augustyn, A., Klin, A., & Volkmar, F. R. (2005). Perception and production of prosody by speakers with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 35, 205–220.
• Schachter, S., & Singer, J. (1962). Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state. Psychological Review, 69(5), 379–399.
• Williams, C. E., & Stevens, K. N. (1972). Emotions and speech: Some acoustical correlates. The journal of the acoustical society of America, 52(4B), 1238–1250.

*there are some studies to show fear (like a physical threat) is primal and bypasses interpretation (so you can escape from something dangerous). I don’t consider fear of public speaking to be the same type of primal fear to escape from being killed.

MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I’m the doctor that can’t give you meds or tell you why you hate your boss. But I can talk forever about cultural and digital psychology. This blog helps me stay on top of a field I love so much, share what I’ve found, and constantly push psychology’s application to life and work in meaningful ways.