Summing up Mathematics Anxiety

Mathematics anxiety, also called mathemaphobia, can be defined as feelings of tension, nervousness, or even fear, that some people experience when doing mathematics at school, at home or at work. Research has shown that it is separate from general anxiety and test anxiety. It is considered a distinctive phobia as it is linked to fear caused by specific stimuli and specific situations.

Mathematics anxiety can cause: • Physiological symptoms, such as increased heart rate, irregular breathing, sweaty palms, tummy ache, and headaches. • Emotional symptoms, resulting in feelings of uneasiness or even distress in mathematics lessons. • Cognitive symptoms, such as intrusive negative thoughts, ruminations or worries where students would think things like “I am just not a maths person” or “I can’t do maths”. These worries can overload their working memory, which is the type of memory that allows us to hold and manipulate information in our head when completing tasks such as mental calculations, and consequently disrupt their ability to perform well in mathematics.

Thank you for your interest. Not every student’s maths anxiety is so pronounced that it requires clinical intervention, but for those who do, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) may be helpful. CBT has been used to increase self-concept and to reduce the symptoms of mathematics anxiety in middle and high school students.

The main goal of CBT is to identify and replace automatic maladaptive thoughts with more effective and realistic thoughts to change people’s core beliefs, emotions and behaviours. CBT has been shown to be effective to treat anxiety in clinical settings and is a popular educational intervention to address mathematics anxiety in school settings. CBT interventions to alleviate the symptoms of maths anxiety include the following approaches: • teaching students how to identify and cope with negative thoughts (going from “I am going to make a mistake” and “I am going to get a bad grade” to “I am still learning so it is normal to make mistakes” and “If I study for the test, I will probably do well”); • introducing students to relaxation techniques as a coping strategy; and • graded exposure where students complete tasks listed on a ‘fear hierarchy’ scale (i.e., maths-related activities and situations ranked according to difficulty) structured in such a way that students can experience early success before attempting harder maths tasks.

Mathematics anxiety is thought to be caused by social factors and pre-existing cognitive difficulties (Maloney & Beilock, 2012).

If we look at social factors, parents’ own mathematics anxiety has a negative impact on children’s maths achievement, but only if they frequently help their children with their maths homework. Parents’ beliefs about mathematics and their expectations about their children’s competence in maths also strongly influence their children’s attitudes towards mathematics and achievement. Additionally, research indicates that girls (but not boys) who have been exposed to female teachers who themselves suffer from mathematics anxiety have poorer mathematics achievement via girls’ beliefs about who is good at maths.

When examining cognitive factors, research has shown that poor abstract thinking, visuospatial processing and even developmental dyscalculia can contribute to the development of MA.

As you go back to study statistics, you can work on your emotion regulation skills to keep your anxiety at bay. By doing so, you can modify the impact of your negative emotions on your mental state by changing the nature of the emotion you are experiencing when you are faced with statistics tasks. There are different ways to do this, and studies have indicated that cognitive reappraisal and mindfulness training work well. Firstly, cognitive reappraisal can be used to reinterpret anxiety-inducing stimuli in a way that reduces their negative emotional response. If you reappraise a stressful task as an exciting challenge and your physical arousal (e.g., increased heartbeat) as something that will facilitate your performance, your achievement will improve. Secondly, mindfulness training has also been shown to be effective at reducing the symptoms of maths anxiety and improving performance in maths, as it can improve the self-regulation of attention and cognitive control. Simple breathing exercises can be used to redirect your attention and regulate anxious thoughts.