Major controversies in Fluency Disorders: Clarifying the relationship between anxiety and stuttering

摘要

In my experience, pairing the words "anxiety" and "stuttering" rarely fails to evoke passionate discussion about the nature of the probable relationship between them. Most researchers and clinicians in the area seem to have strong feelings about this relationship. Even those who stutter, who are not scientists or health related professionals, have thrown their views into the ring so to speak, and many have made worthwhile contributions to the debate. Over the past 50 years or more, this has resulted in compelling and sometimes controversial theories and hypotheses. Consequently, it has been a long-standing ambition of mine to organize a special Journal of Fluency Disorders (JFD) issue on this topic, hopefully a special issue that can shed some light on the nature of this relationship. I am not naive enough to expect that this issue will resolve the controversy, though I do hope that the papers presented in this special edition will collectively make a worthwhile and valuable contribution. It is therefore with great satisfaction that I present to you a series of excellent and informative papers on this topic.