Shenakht Journal of Psychology & Psychiatry

Introduction: Speaking anxiety in educational settings is among the most prevalent and important social anxieties playing a critical role in the anxiety experienced by students.
Objective: The current study aimed to test the structural relations model of personality traits with speaking anxiety among students.
Method: The present research was descriptive-correlational of structural equations type. The statistical population consisted of all undergraduate students of psychology at Islamic Azad University, Babol branch, in the academic year 2021-2022, among them 136 people were selected by the convenience sampling method. McCrae and Costa’s Personality Traits Questionnaire (1985) and Bartholomay and Houlihan’s (2016) Public Speaking Anxiety Scale were used for data collection, and data analysis was performed by structural equation modeling using SPSS software version 18 and Amos software.
Results: According to the results, the personality traits of extroversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and agreeableness were significantly and negatively related to speaking anxiety (p<0.05), and the personality trait of neuroticism was significantly and positively related to speaking anxiety in students (p<0.05). Also, according to the results of structural equations, extroversion (β=-0.033), conscientiousness (β=-0.162), and agreeableness (β=0.001) negatively and neuroticism (β=0.533) positively affected speaking anxiety.
Conclusion: The results demonstrate that personality traits significantly affect speaking anxiety, and the structural relations model has the necessary fit. Therefore, teachers should be aware of personality traits because conducting personality assessment may be very beneficial in directing students in learning and improving speaking.