Exploring the relationship between gamma-band activity and maths anxiety

Abstract

Previous research has outlined high anxiety in connection with gamma modulation, identifying that gamma-band activity (40-100 Hz) correlates with processing of threat perception, attention and anxiety. Maths anxiety research has also noted the involvement of these aspects, yet this has not been investigated from a neurophysiological standpoint. Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to research gamma-band activity in relation to maths anxiety over two studies.The first measured gamma differences during the processing of complex addition and multiplication stimuli. Results identified differences between high and low maths anxious individuals; significantly greater gamma power was observed in those with high maths anxiety than those with low maths anxiety. As a control condition was not used, the second study replicated the design, but also applied a non-numerical control condition amongst the other stimuli sets. This showed significantly greater gamma activity in high maths anxious individuals across numerical conditions, but not in the non-numerical condition. High maths anxious individuals likely show attentional bias and threat perception to numerical-based stimuli, as indexed by gamma power. This study provides the first evidence of greater gammaband activity in high maths anxious individuals and serves as a foundation for the exploration of gamma activity in high maths anxious individuals.

Anxiety-like behavior induced by salicylate depends on age and can be prevented by a single dose of 5-MeO-DMT

“…In rodents, changes in slow hippocampal gamma rhythms are generally associated, among other things, with slower running speed or increase in synchronization between CA3 and the cingulate cortex during immobility (Ahmed and Mehta, 2012;Buzsáki, 1986;Buzsáki and Wang, 2012;Zheng et al, 2015). Other studies showed that alteration gamma with anxiety behaviors (Batashvili et al, 2019;Cruces-Solis et al, 2019;Zhou et al, 2018). Nevertheless, to our knowledge, there is no study showing a systematic effect of aging on magnitude of gamma power, except when degeneration is present (Etter et al, 2019;Goutagny et al, 2013).…”

EEG Functional Connectivity Underlying Emotional Valance and Arousal Using Minimum Spanning Trees

“…There are significant differences in network characteristics between HAHV and LAHV, HALV and LALV, and HAHV and HALV in the γ band. In other recent research related to emotion, significant differences were also mainly concentrated in the γ band (Mu et al, 2017;Batashvili et al, 2019). In addition, recent studies on emotion classifiers have found that the γ band provides the highest classification accuracy of any frequency band (Mohammadi et al, 2017).…”

The neurophysiological relationship between number anxiety and the EEG gamma-band

“…Data were averaged within a specific segment of the gamma frequency band (35-70 Hz), chosen based on previous research observing gamma activity and threat (30-50Hz; Luo et al, 2009Luo et al, , 2007, anxiety (35-70;Oathes et al, 2008) and math anxiety (35-70;Batashvili et al, 2019).…”

“…Previous research has shown that the gamma band is responsible for the processing of threat-related stimuli (Garcia-Garcia et al, 2010;Maratos et al, 2012) and attentional bias in high anxious individuals (Bar-Haim et al, 2007). This has since been related to math anxiety, whereby high anxious individuals have been shown to display increased gamma power for math-related problems of varying complexities, but not for word-based tasks (Batashvili, Staples, Baker, & Sheffield, 2019). Furthermore, studies have shown that task demand may not be responsible for these increasing effects.…”

“…Research above has outlined that processing of math stimuli in high math anxious populations generates higher levels of gamma band activity (Batashvili et al, 2019). Studies also propose that it is the initial perception, rather than manipulating and calculating number, that causes this response (Lyons & Beilock, 2012).…”