I'll answer from here: Thank you for your comment! You seem quite versed in behavioral psychology, which helps in understanding the theory and will also help in understanding my responses to you now! Let’s break it down **"*****Or put another way: What is the freeze response that happens right before we stutter?"*** There is a great difficulty in understanding this at a physiological and neurophysiological level in our body. These are processes that occur in milliseconds, along with the activation of other processes at the same time (like, for example, brain functioning). So, there is a huge difficulty in studying neurophysiological issues because of that, and this is a general difficulty in the field of neurology or neurophysiology. So, your question is yet to be answered by science, what exactly is the “freeze” response? Is it a difficulty in the nervous synapses, in the communication of the brain hemispheres, in the nervous signals that tense the muscles? I don’t know. However, we can study when these responses occur, which is much easier. In the case of stuttering, we could theorize that it happens in the presence of an aversive stimulus, and that environmental stimuli become aversive through classical conditioning. ***"Ultimately, I do believe this learned reflex is an unconditioned response. For example, if a mother walks away from her baby, the baby may start crying and then he stops crying once she returns. This suggests, to me at least, that at a fundamental level, human DNA may be coded to "prevent oneself from executing communication in response to fear of social rejection" (unconditioned response) before any learning takes place. What if this reflex response is excessively malfunctioning in stutterers? Your thoughts?"*** Every human reflex, to be considered a reflex, must first be an unconditioned response. Only unconditioned responses can become conditioned through the conditioning process. Example: Tachycardia is an unconditioned response in the human body because every human is born with it. It’s a response selected through years of natural selection. Tachycardia arises when the body perceives a threat from anything, just like shaking or turning pale. Therefore, tachycardia is an unconditioned response. However, if you get run over by a car (aversive stimulus), the next time you see a car approaching, you may have physiological reactions of tachycardia, which have been conditioned to the stimulus "car" (due to the accident). In this context, we call this a conditioned response because it was conditioned to the stimulus "car." But it’s essentially the same response; the terms unconditioned and conditioned refer to the process that led to the response happening. In this sense, I don’t think the freezing response, as you put it, would be related to social rejection, since it can happen in several situations, like being robbed or attacked by a lion. If you try to speak in these situations, you’ll see that your fluency will be affected the same way. Unconditioned responses generally have biological value tied to survival. Tachycardia, for example, is your body increasing your heart rate to initiate intense physical activity (run or fight); “shaking” is the initiation of muscle activation; “sweating” when tense is the physiological (unconditioned) response to cool the body when the body temperature rises during physical activity, and so I could continue with several others. Generally, these unconditioned responses would have been useful if we still lived in the jungle and were escaping from wild animals (our evolutionary origin), but for taking an important exam, speaking fluently, or presenting in public, they just get in the way. ++