Demystifying math could ease anxiety

Erin Allday:

Human beings have all kinds of irrational fears and anxieties about everyday objects and situations: spiders and snakes, heights and enclosed spaces, airplanes and needles. Math.

That last one, in fact, may be very common, just going by the number of adults who freely admit to hating math or being bad at it. That supposed dislike of math, scientists say, may be disguising a real phobia that probably begins at an early age.

Stanford researchers studying math anxiety in second- and third-grade students found that kids who were stressed about math had brain activity patterns similar to people with other phobias. When the children were faced with a simple addition problem, the parts of their brain that feel stress lit up - and the parts that are good at doing math deactivated.

Interestingly, the children with math anxiety weren't actually bad at math - they got about the same number of answers right as their anxiety-free peers - but it took them more time to solve the problems.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at April 13, 2012 1:12 AM
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