Abstract
Sixty-one high-math-anxious persons and sixty-one low-math-anxious persons completed a modified working memory capacity task, designed to measure working memory capacity under a dysfunctional math-related context and working memory capacity under a valence-neutral context. Participants were required to perform simple tasks with emotionally benign material (i.e., lists of letters) over short intervals while simultaneously reading and making judgments about sentences describing dysfunctional math-related thoughts or sentences describing emotionally-neutral facts about the world. Working memory capacity for letters under the dysfunctional math-related context, relative to working memory capacity performance under the valence-neutral context, was poorer overall in the high-math-anxious group compared with the low-math-anxious group. The findings show a particular difficulty employing working memory in math-related contexts in high-math-anxious participants. Theories that can provide reasonable interpretations for these findings and interventions that can reduce anxiety-induced worrying intrusive thoughts or improve working memory capacity for math anxiety are discussed.
Highlights
Mathematics anxiety (MA) is defined as a feeling of tension and anxiety that interferes with the manipulation of numbers and the solving of mathematical problems in a wide variety of ordinary life and academic situations [1]
Consistent with the prediction, the results demonstrated that, on one hand, HMA participants performed worse on the working memory capacity (WMC) task under the context of math-related sentences than LMA participants; on the other hand, there was no group (HMA versus LMA) difference in performance on the WMC task under the context of valence-neutral sentences
The present study found more detailed results—working memory (WM) load effects, that is, impaired WMC in MA emerged only in high WM load trials but not in low WM load trials. This result indicated that the effects of MA on WMC were not all-ornone effects but might be accumulated effects
Summary
Mathematics anxiety (MA) is defined as a feeling of tension and anxiety that interferes with the manipulation of numbers and the solving of mathematical problems in a wide variety of ordinary life and academic situations [1]. Apart from enjoying mathematics less, having lower perceptions of their mathematical abilities, and ignoring the value of mathematics in everyday life [2,3,4], people with MA are characterized by increased worries about math failure [5], an avoidance of math and/or numerical tasks [6], and even a negative emotional response to the prospect of doing math [4]. Despite normal performance in most thinking and reasoning tasks, individuals with MA perform poorly when numerical information is involved [3, 4, 7, 8]. Empirical evidence has been found for performance differences as a function of MA. These differences typically are not observed when engaged in simple addition or multiplication.
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