Self-perception on language performance following stroke: Implications for rehabilitative efforts.

Acquiring disability in adulthood must be personally devastating. The purpose of this study was to understand the relationship between psychosocial constructs and language production in participants with aphasia. Twenty-one participants with nonfluent aphasia completed measures of confrontation naming and severity of aphasia before completing questionnaires about anxiety and self-perception of their upcoming performance on an object-naming task. Participants completed a baseline object-naming task. A stratified randomization was used to divide participants into two groups: an 'easy' group and a 'hard' group. Participants in the 'easy' group received an easy induction practice task. Participants in the 'hard' group received a hard induction task. Following the induction tasks, participants were asked to complete several rating scales designed specifically for this study to measure feelings of anxiety and ratings of self-perception of upcoming performance. Participants in both groups received the same experimental task; however participants in the 'easy' group were led to believe that the task would be easy, while participants in the 'hard' group were led to believe that the task would be hard. The proposed model for this study suggested that the relationship between anxiety and performance on the experimental task was modulated by selfperception. Results indicate that the proposed model was backwards. Findings suggest that the pattern of the data better fit a model where the relationship between self-perception and performance on the experimental task was modulated by anxiety.