\->The chosen quote very clearly states that emotional reactions can be trained or "conditioned" to trigger stuttering. Classical conditioning, by definition, is learned behavior. Stuttering is not a learned behavior that happens through conditioning in any way. That theory has been disproven a long time ago, and I am happy to send you more recent and up-to-date articles to show that. You are right to say that emotional aspects can theoretically be "trained," but that does not mean it is an easy, accessible, or feasible training. If it could be trained the way you are thinking, we wouldn't have so many problems with anxiety or depression disorders, as we could "train" emotions or "untrain" emotions like sadness or anxiety until they disappear, and we could solve human distress. That is not possible. The process of classical conditioning of emotions is not voluntary or conscious; it is an important biological survival capacity that cannot be turned off, and it is constantly in operation. In this way, emotions can be manipulated at some level, like you can "stop" being afraid of a cockroach or afraid of walking in a violent neighborhood. However, it is difficult, laborious, and everything can collapse depending on the situations you experience. For example, you can reverse your fear of cockroaches with desensitization techniques, but if you encounter an aversive situation with a cockroach again, it is possible that your fear will return to square one. This phenomenon is called "respondent resurgence," and there are other characteristics of classical conditioning that also make this process difficult. If a person who stutters frequently experiences aversive stimuli due to speaking (a person who stutters), it is likely that these conditioning effects never disappear and even expand to new stimuli over time. The word "training" refers to the fact that they are learned factors through contact with the environment, but not that they are manipulable or extinguishable at our will. Furthermore, according to the theory, it doesn't matter if you are anxious about being judged for your speech or because your hair is messy; the effect of disintegration could happen in the same way. In other words, it should apply to any environmental stimulus that causes you negative emotions to achieve this level of "unlearning," which is literally impossible. This would be the mechanism by which genetic predisposition presents itself in stuttering, through the effect that emotions have on behavior. The behavior of speaking, yes, that is learned, but the effect of disintegration that simply happens while the speech behavior is occurring is not. A similar example of the disintegration effect: you are capable of pointing a gun at a target in perfect conditions. But in high levels of anxiety, while holding the gun, you will shake, you will press the trigger with a different intensity, speed, or even your muscles may stiffen and you can't press it. Did you learn to "shake" or stiffen your muscles? Or is it something that simply happens in your behavior due to the influence of physiological aspects involved in anxiety, even against your will? Shaking in situations of fear and anxiety, for example, is such a physiological process that it can be found in several mammals like dogs, cats, and other animals, and there is no evidence that it can be blocked from human physiology. It is similar to what the authors are talking about. And you can observe this effect even in people who don’t stutter. In situations of stress, fear, or anxiety, they show a lower level of fluency, and that’s where the universal stereotype comes from that stuttering is “being nervous.” It is evident that emotions affect fluency, and this is a fact, although how it does so is still debatable. People who stutter have been saying this systematically for hundreds of years; anyone who stutters experiences the influence of emotions, and science has not been able to uncover exactly what the emotional mechanism is that affects stuttering because it simply means that we do not yet have the methodological conditions to investigate these phenomena. Similarly, we also do not have the conditions to study in-depth the genetic/hereditary factors and their functioning in stuttering, even though we know they exist.+