U.S.-British team finds 'in-the-moment anxiety' plays role in math 'underperformance'

A team of researchers from the United States and the United Kingdom, who set out to study math anxiety and determine how best to help math-anxious people, found that not all math-anxiety underperformance is alike, and remedial methods to increase math proficiency have to take the differences into account to better help the math-anxious.

Their research is published in the journal npj Science of Learning, March 21. Lead author Dr. Richard Daker is interviewed below.

As the authors note in the introduction, math anxiety "underperformance can have important consequences: High-paying jobs in STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] that rely on math often go unfilled, and math skills are consistently predictive of important life outcomes, including financial and even health outcomes."

Explaining math anxiety

The study examines the common assumption that math anxiety affects underperformance because the in-the-moment anxiety state disrupts the person's working memory and "goal-directed processing resources." The researchers devised an experiment to test how much this was actually the case, and whether there were other factors.

The study design included online surveys to assess both math anxiety and emotion regulation, and had 288 participants. Self-reported measures were used to index anxiety and physiological factors. The researchers used as one objective physiological measure the high-frequency heart rate variability, "which reflects the degree to which a person's resting heart rate is under parasympathetic control." In general, people whose heart rate variability is high are thought to better cope with stress.

The laboratory part of the experiment occurred a few days after the online surveys. The researchers assigned participants both math and word tasks, which were performed while the participants were monitored for electrocardiograph activity, skin conductance and other measures.

As the article notes, "To our knowledge our results provide the first direct support for the idea that feelings of in-the-moment anxiety are a significant reason why math-anxious people underperform in math."

The study, however, found that this only partially explains the connection between math anxiety and underperformance. The researchers write: "... roughly two-thirds of the association between math anxiety and math performance remained unexplained by in-the-moment anxiety associated with math, suggesting that an account of math-anxious underperformance that relies on in-the moment anxiety as the primary explanatory factor is incomplete."

In addition, the researchers found that although high-frequency heart rate variability did lessen the anxiety in the moment, the people with high levels of high-frequency heart rate variability still underperformed in math. 

The researchers tested the idea that the heart rate variability "may moderate not the magnitude of the math anxiety math performance link, but the mechanisms by which it is realized."

A practical result of their findings, the researchers suggest, is that the heart rate variability may help predict which students will benefit from different remedial interventions.

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Richard Daker et al. "Does anxiety explain why math-anxious people underperform in math?" Nature, March 21, 2023.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-023-00156-z

An interview with Richard Daker

Investigating the causes of math anxiety

Dr. Daker is a cognitive neuroscience specialist at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He discussed the article on math anxiety with Current Science Daily via email.

What is math anxiety?

Math anxiety is commonly defined as having a tendency to feel tension or apprehension at the idea of doing math. One of the biggest reasons why researchers care so much about math anxiety is that it is associated with poor performance in math. If we could better understand why it is that people who are high in math anxiety perform poorly in math, we'll be better able to develop new methods to help them succeed.

How prevalent do you think it is among college students?

High levels of math anxiety are fairly common in college students. We see this in our data, and we also see this anecdotally. When I tell people I study math anxiety, it's not uncommon for the person I'm talking to to say "I have that."

What is the widely accepted explanation of math anxiety?

When I started my Ph.D. in 2016, one of the main explanations I would hear for why math anxiety is linked to underperformance in math rests on the idea of what we call "state anxiety," or in-the-moment anxiety one feels while doing math. The idea is that if you're someone who is anxious about math, when it becomes time to do math, you experience heightened anxiety levels, and those heightened anxiety levels take up cognitive resources you would otherwise devote to math and mess up your performance.

Rather than having one task in front of you, complete this difficult math problem,you now have two tasks,  complete this difficult math problem AND deal with your anxiety. This explanation seemed plausible to me, but it didn't seem to tell the whole story. Most important, it had never been very directly tested. That's what we set out to do in this research, to test how much "anxiety" actually explains why math-anxious people underperform in math.

How did you set about testing this hypothesis?

We adopted a version of a paradigm that my adviser, Dr. Ian Lyons, developed back when he was in grad school. We brought people into the lab and told them that they would be doing two types of tasks, math tasks and word tasks. Importantly, before they did each type of task, we told them which one was coming up next, a math task or a word task. Right after we told them what was coming up, we asked them to report how anxious they were feeling, and then they would go ahead and complete the task.

The main questions we had were (a) would it be the case that people who say they're high in math anxiety actually experience more anxiety in-the-moment just before doing a math task, and (b) if so, would this heightened anxiety explain why they underperformed in math.

In addition to having our participants run through this paradigm, we also collected physiological measures, things like heart rate and skin conductance, that are often associated with anxiety or with the ability to deal with anxiety. These measures could give us better insights into what people with math anxiety would be experiencing while doing math.

Your article talks about emotion regulation. What is it, and how is it involved in math anxiety?

Emotion regulation is, like the name suggests, the ability to regulate our own emotions. In this case, the main emotion regulation we had in mind was the ability of those who are high in math anxiety to deal with their feelings of anxiety and thus feel less anxious while doing math.

Our thinking was that if it's the case that math anxiety leads to increased in-the-moment anxiety, which in turn leads to poor math performance, it might be the case that math-anxious people who are good at regulating negative emotions would avoid experiencing that heightened in-the-moment anxiety and maybe therefore not underperform as much.

What were your main findings?

There were multiple important findings in this study.

First, we found that it is, indeed, the case that in-the-moment anxiety while doing math can explain why math-anxious people underperform. However, we also found that this wasn't the whole story: In-the-moment feelings of anxiety could explain a significant portion of why math-anxious people underperformed, but it couldn't explain all of it. 

This means that there must be other reasons why math-anxious people underperform, for example, possibly having had less practice with math as a result of avoiding something they're anxious about.

Second, we found that math-anxious people who had high levels of high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV), a psychophysiological measurement of parasympathetic nervous system activity that is associated with emotion regulation ability, were able to feel less anxious while doing math than people who were lower in HF-HRV. This supported our idea that emotion regulation ability could allow math-anxious people to feel less anxious in the moment.

However, we also found something very surprising. Even though these math-anxious people with high HF-HRV felt less anxious in-the-moment when doing math, they didn't actually perform any better than math-anxious people with low HF-HRV who were feeling especially anxious in-the-moment.

We're not sure exactly why this is the case. We'll need more research to figure that one out. But even though we don't totally understand it yet, this finding means something very important: Different math-anxious people can perform poorly in math for different reasons.

How do you hope your findings will change the type of interventions made to help math-anxious students?

Our main hope is that this research can help pave the way for more individualized math anxiety interventions. If different math-anxious students underperform for different reasons, that means that different interventions are needed for different students.

Some students may benefit more from ways to deal with their in-the-moment anxiety, while others may need more practice with math to bulk up their skills. If we can find ways to identify which intervention would work for which math-anxious student, that could really help a ton in terms of helping these students perform their best.

What are your next steps?

We are currently testing this idea that HF-HRV levels can identify which students benefit most from interventions that focus on emotion regulation. We also hope to continue exploring different reasons why math-anxious people might underperform.

Our hope is that our findings prompt other researchers to join in on this line of investigation so we can have the best chance of helping math-anxious students succeed.