Abstract
There is a growing consensus that math anxiety highly correlates with trait anxiety and that the emotional component elicited by math anxiety affects math performance. Yet few studies have examined the impact of “specific math anxiety” (high math anxiety and low other kinds of anxiety) on math performance and the underlying physiological and affective mechanism. The present study examines the mediation effect of heart rate variability—an affective measurement indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)—in the relationship between specific math anxiety and arithmetic speed. A total of 386 junior high school students completed a self-reported questionnaire to measure their anxiety level. Among this sample, 29 individuals with specific math anxiety (high math anxiety and low reading and trait anxiety), 29 with specific reading anxiety (high reading anxiety and low math and trait anxiety), 24 with specific trait anxiety (high trait anxiety and low math and reading anxiety), and 22 controls (low math, trait and reading anxiety) were selected to participate in an arithmetic task and a reading task while RSA was recorded when they performed the tasks. Results revealed that individuals with specific math anxiety showed lower RSA and longer reaction time than the other three groups in the arithmetic task. Regression and mediation analyses further revealed that RSA mediated the relation between specific math anxiety and arithmetic speed. The present study provides the first account of evidence for the affective hypothesis of specific math anxiety and suggests that affective responses may be an important mechanism underlying the detrimental effect of specific math anxiety on math performance.
Highlights
Individual differences in mathematic achievement have been the focus of a wide strand of research and a growing area of concern for policy makers and educational psychologists in the last decades
Specific math anxiety individuals may adapt to regulate their emotions in arithmetic tasks, longer reaction time (RT) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) suppression of these individuals when performing arithmetic tasks in the present study suggest that their physiological reaction and behavioral performance would not be able to be compensated by emotional adaption (Beauchaine, 2001; Calkins and Keane, 2004; Gentzler et al, 2009)
Previous studies have indicated that RSA represents one of the neural foundations for emotion and behavior and plays a linkage role between affective response and external behaviors (Porges, 2001), the present study provides the first account of evidence for the affective hypothesis of RSA in math anxiety and suggests that affective responses indexed by RSA reactivity may be an important neural mechanism underlying the detrimental effect of math anxiety on math performance
Summary
Individual differences in mathematic achievement have been the focus of a wide strand of research and a growing area of concern for policy makers and educational psychologists in the last decades. Several factors have been shown to explain individual differences in mathematic achievement (such as socioeconomic status, see Ritchie and Bates, 2013), math anxiety has been widely accepted to have a robust negative impact on math performance (Hill et al, 2016; Sorvo et al, 2019; Xie et al, 2019; Zhang et al, 2019). Trait anxiety has been identified to have negative effects on performance in math tasks (Owens et al, 2008). This might be because math anxiety and trait anxiety had shared genetic and environmental risk factors, suggested by a behavioral genetic twin study (Wang et al, 2014). The current study for the first time tests the impact of “specific math anxiety” (high math anxiety but low trait anxiety) on math performance in middle school adolescents
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