Math Anxiety is REAL
Psych 🧠- 248/300
Reader,
If you hated maths in your childhood (& still do), you’re going to love this research.
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What is it?
The study investigates the source of anxiety in individuals with high mathematics-anxiety (HMAs).
It finds that when HMAs anticipate a math-related task, their anxiety triggers increased activity in brain regions associated with detecting visceral threats and the experience of pain.
Interestingly, this heightened brain activity is not observed during actual math performance, suggesting that it's the anticipation of math rather than the math itself that induces this painful response.
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What do I need to know?
These findings indicate that the sensation of pain, triggered by anticipating math-related tasks, could explain why HMAs often avoid math and math-related situations, leading to a reluctance to pursue math classes or careers.
When anticipating an upcoming math-task, the higher one’s math anxiety, the more one increases activity in regions associated with bodily threat detection and the experience of visceral pain itself (INSp).
Given the findings were specific to cue-activity, it is not that math itself hurts; rather, merely the anticipation of math is painful.
Anticipatory anxiety about math is grounded in the simulation of visceral threat and even pain. These results also provide a potential neural mechanism to explain the observation that HMAs tend to avoid math and math-related situations, which in turn can bias HMAs away from taking math classes or even entire math-related career paths.
Sources:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0048076
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/10/preventing-math-anxiety