The genetic and environmental aetiology of spatial, mathematics and general anxiety

Abstract

Individuals differ in their level of general anxiety as well as in their level of anxiety towards specific activities, such as mathematics and spatial tasks. Both specific anxieties correlate moderately with general anxiety, but the aetiology of their association remains unexplored. Moreover, the factor structure of spatial anxiety is to date unknown. The present study investigated the factor structure of spatial anxiety, its aetiology, and the origins of its association with general and mathematics anxiety in a sample of 1,464 19-21-year-old twin pairs from the UK representative Twins Early Development Study. Participants reported their general, mathematics and spatial anxiety as part of an online battery of tests. We found that spatial anxiety is a multifactorial construct, including two components: navigation anxiety and rotation/visualization anxiety. All anxiety measures were moderately heritable (30% to 41%), and non-shared environmental factors explained the remaining variance. Multivariate genetic analysis showed that, although some genetic and environmental factors contributed to all anxiety measures, a substantial portion of genetic and non-shared environmental influences were specific to each anxiety construct. This suggests that anxiety is a multifactorial construct phenotypically and aetiologically, highlighting the importance of studying anxiety within specific contexts.

Genetic factors underlie the association between anxiety, attitudes and performance in mathematics

“…These findings extend the line of evidence provided by Wang et al 29 and suggest that the common etiology of the association between MA, self-efficacy, interest and cognition may be partly specific to the domain of mathematics. Our results are consistent with evidence showing genetic and environmental specificity for general anxiety and measures of anxiety in the mathematics and spatial domains 34 . Research integrating measures of anxiety and performance in other domains, such as for example second language learning, will be able to further test the hypothesis of domain-specific factors linking affect and cognition in the field of mathematics.…”

“…This is consistent with a number of studies that have observed an association between MA and performance beyond general anxiety [31][32][33] . In line with this, a recent twin study has shown that the genetic and environmental etiology of MA only partly overlap with that of general anxiety 34 . Crucially, Wang et al reported that the partial etiological overlap between MA and general anxiety was independent from the etiology of the overlap between MA and mathematics performance in a problem verification task 29 .…”

“…Sex explained a relatively small portion of the variance in all measures (0-7%). Previous genetically informative work on these same measures 34,50 did not find support for the existence of qualitative differences in the etiology of MA and performance between males and females. Consequently, these analyses were not repeated.…”

“…The measure includes nine items that are rated on a 5point scale, ranging from 'not nervous at all' to 'very nervous'. Two items were adapted from the original version to make them age appropriate for the current sample 34 , these are: 'Listening to a maths lecture' and 'Reading a maths book'. The AMAS showed excellent internal validity (α = 0.94) and test-retest reliability (r = 0.85) 36 .…”

Evidence for a unitary structure of spatial cognition beyond general intelligence

“…In our previous work 407 examining the structure of spatial and mathematics anxiety, we found evidence for a separation between the 408 anxiety people feel towards spatial navigation and the anxiety towards object-based skills, such as completing 409 difficult jigsaw puzzles and building flat-pack furniture from instructions. 43 This observed difference in 410 perceptions and feelings towards different spatial activities might contribute to explaining why ideas, theories 411 and taxonomies of spatial cognition have mostly favoured a multifaceted account of spatial skills. 412 413 Although our study provides the most comprehensive investigation of the structure of spatial ability to date in a 414 large sample and addresses several outstanding research questions concerning spatial cognition, it was limited 415 by the technology available to us at the time.…”