Mathematics Anxiety Effects in Simple and Complex Addition

Abstract

Two experiments report on the relationship between level of mathematics anxiety and timed performance on simple and complex addition problems. In both experiments, subjects at differing levels of mathematics anxiety responded to one- and two-column addition problems in a verification task. Anxiety effects on the simple one-column addition problems were largely limited to the false problems. For example, when the incorrect answer differed by 1 from the correct value (e.g. 7+9=15), high anxious subjects were particularly slow to decide “false”, and became even less accurate when incorrect answers deviated further from correct (e.g. 7+9=39), the opposite of the normal trend. In both experiments, anxiety effects were especially prominent in the two-column addition problems, particularly when the problem involved the carry operation. Experiment 3 tested the same types of stimuli in an untimed task and showed equivalent, high accuracy for all levels of mathematics anxiety, arguing against an alternative interpretation of the anxiety effects based on the covariation between mathematics anxiety and competence. Speed accuracy trade-offs, difficulties in rejecting incorrect addition problems, and large reaction-time differences for complex problems characterise the results and suggest several directions for further empirical tests of the general mathematics anxiety-tocomplexity relationship. In summary, there appear to be several on-line cognitive consequences or correlates of mathematics anxiety.