When Math Hurts: Math Anxiety Predicts Pain Network Activation in Anticipation of Doing Math

Abstract

Math can be difficult, and for those with high levels of mathematics-anxiety (HMAs), math is associated with tension, apprehension, and fear. But what underlies the feelings of dread effected by math anxiety? Are HMAs’ feelings about math merely psychological epiphenomena, or is their anxiety grounded in simulation of a concrete, visceral sensation – such as pain – about which they have every right to feel anxious? We show that, when anticipating an upcoming math-task, the higher one’s math anxiety, the more one increases activity in regions associated with visceral threat detection, and often the experience of pain itself (bilateral dorso-posterior insula). Interestingly, this relation was not seen during math performance, suggesting that it is not that math itself hurts; rather, the anticipation of math is painful. Our data suggest that pain network activation underlies the intuition that simply anticipating a dreaded event can feel painful. These results may also provide a potential neural mechanism to explain why HMAs tend to avoid math and math-related situations, which in turn can bias HMAs away from taking math classes or even entire math-related career paths.

Do Better in Math: How Your Body Posture May Change Stereotype Threat Response

“…Self-reported anxiety levels have been correlated with a significant increase in breathing difficulty, neck and shoulder tension, headaches, depression, and anxiety, which confirmed the previous findings that students with higher math anxiety have increased physiological activation such as neural activation, heart rate, and increased cortisol (Faust, 1992;Lyons & Beilock, 2012;Pletzer, Kronbichler, Nuerk, & Kerschbaum, 2015). Most likely, the students attribute physiological reactions such as increased heart rate and breathing changes negatively, which amplifies their negative selfperception and exacerbates their anxiety symptoms; this may then inhibit their cognitive ability to perform on math tasks.…”

Math anxiety: Brain cortical network changes in anticipation of doing mathematics

“…Two of them (Lyons & Beilock, 2012a, 2012b examined the brain reactivity during the anticipation phase of doing math and showed local activations in math anxious individuals.…”

“…Although the functional neuroanatomy of anticipatory anxiety is known ( Nitschke et al, 2009;Nitschke, Sarinopoulos, MacKiewicz, Schaefer, & Davidson, 2006) and it comes in line with the findings of Lyons & Beilock(2012b), the present study tries to explore the differences in the cerebral networks' topology between self-reported low math-anxious (LMA) and high math-anxious (HMA) individuals. For this reason, multichannel EEG recordings were used in order to compute the cortical networks by employing the methodology proposed by De Vico Fallani et al(2010).…”

“…One of the milestone studies (Lyons & Beilock, 2012b) in MA research found that math anxious individuals activate more regions related to pain perception during the anticipation of mathematical processing, like the dorsal part of the posterior insula and mid-cingulate cortex. Moreover, Young, Wu, & Menon (2012) reported that MA activates regions (right amygdala) that regulate negative emotions, while they have also reported that MA inhibits activation in brain regions associated with mathematical reasoning, such as the posterior parietal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.…”

“…Our findings were independent of task difficulty/complexity, individual performance, and general state/trait anxiety levels. Following our previous work regarding the involvement of MA in mathoriented tasks, and inspired by the findings of Lyons & Beilock(2012b), we would like to study how cerebral functional networks are altered by MA, invoked during the anticipation phase prior to a mathematical related experiment. From a phenomenological perspective, it is assumed that during this anticipation phase, the math-anxious individuals will have negative expectations about their ability to cope with the experiment's upcoming mathematical tasks (Barlow, 2004;Barlow, 1991).…”