Abstract
Adequate mathematical competencies are currently indispensable in professional and social life. However, mathematics is often associated with stress and frustration and the confrontation with tasks that require mathematical knowledge triggers anxiety in many children. We examined if there is a relationship between math anxiety and changes in brain structure in children with and without developmental dyscalculia. Our findings showed that math anxiety is related to altered brain structure. In particular, the right amygdala volume was reduced in individuals with higher math anxiety. In conclusion, math anxiety not only hinders children in arithmetic development, but it is associated with altered brain structure in areas related to fear processing. This emphasizes the far-reaching outcome emotional factors in mathematical cognition can have and encourages educators and researchers alike to consider math anxiety to prevent detrimental long-term consequences on school achievement and quality of life, especially in children with developmental dyscalculia.
Highlights
Math anxiety meets all the criteria of a specific phobia such as feelings of tension, stress, frustration and anxiety when manipulating numbers or solving mathematical problems during daily life or in school situations
Our findings demonstrate that domain-specific anxiety was present in children with and without Developmental dyscalculia (DD), children with DD showed higher scores of math anxiety compared to children without math problems
This difference in math anxiety was observed when controlling for age, since the control children (CC) were slightly younger than the DD children were
Summary
Math anxiety meets all the criteria of a specific phobia such as feelings of tension, stress, frustration and anxiety when manipulating numbers or solving mathematical problems during daily life or in school situations. Math anxiety is associated with immediate negative emotional reactions and has detrimental long-term consequences for career choice, employment, and professional success. A recent study has shown that the central component of financial literacy can be traced to numeracy and the emotional attitudes towards numbers like math anxiety[1]. Math anxiety has only recently attracted the interests of the research community and teachers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have just begun to uncover the far-reaching negative consequences of mathematical anxiety. The most prominent theory explains this relationship by suggesting that worrying intrusive thoughts involved in math anxiety consume attentional recourses of working memory, which are less available for current numerical cognition The most prominent theory explains this relationship by suggesting that worrying intrusive thoughts involved in math anxiety consume attentional recourses of working memory, which are less available for current numerical cognition (reviewed by ref. 2)
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