Extract from a report from the Science Daily (20 Oct 2011).
Using brain-imaging technology for the first time with people experiencing mathematics anxiety, University of Chicago scientists have gained new insights into how some students are able to overcome their fears and succeed in maths.
For the highly maths anxious, researchers found a strong link between maths success and activity in a network of brain areas in the frontal and parietal lobes involved in controlling attention and regulating negative emotional reactions. This response kicked in at the very mention of having to solve a mathematics problem.
Instead of feeling anxious about an impending maths task, students who could focus their attention were able to complete difficult problems more successfully. Perhaps counter-intuitively, their success wasn’t just about activating areas of the brain involved in maths calculation. For anxious individuals to succeed, they need to focus on controlling their emotions.
Teaching students to control their emotions prior to doing mathematics may be the best way to overcome the difficulties that often go along with maths anxiety. Without this initial step, simply providing additional mathematical instruction or allowing students to become distracted by trying to squelch emotions once an exam has begun is likely to prove ineffective in producing success.
The study, which the National Science Foundation funded, began by administering a questionnaire to a group of UChicago students to determine if they had maths anxiety. Students answered questions about how anxious they felt when registering for a course, walking to a class, or being handed a textbook which had to do with maths, and so on. An invited group of students who were especially anxious about these tasks had their brains scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they performed difficult maths problems and a similarly difficult spelling task. A group of non-maths-anxious students was selected as a control group.
In the fMRI scanner, students watched a computer screen for different cues in the form of simple, colour-coded shapes. One shape indicated to students they were about to answer questions that tapped their spelling skills, and another shape indicated they were about to do a series of mathematical problems. After a short delay, students then performed a few maths or spelling problems. By analyzing brain responses during the cue and problems separately, researchers were able to look at what went on in highly anxious student’s heads, even before the actual mathematics began.
For the highly anxious, the researchers found a strong connection between maths performance and activity in a network of brain areas in the frontal and parietal lobes.
The more these frontal and parietal regions were activated in maths-anxious students when anticipating an impending maths task, the more their mathematical performance looked like the non-maths-anxious control group. Indeed, highly maths-anxious students who showed little activation in these regions when preparing to do mathematics got only 68 percent of maths problems correct. But those who showed the strongest activation got 83 percent correct — nearly on par with low maths-anxious controls (88 percent correct). This relationship was not seen for the spelling task.
The study found that for the highly maths-anxious students who performed well on the mathematics task, the brain activity that started during the anticipation phase initiated a cascade of brain activity during completion of the mathematics task itself.
Essentially, overcoming maths anxiety appears to be less about what you know and more about convincing yourself to just buckle down and get to it. But if you wait till the exam has already started to deal with your anxiety, it’s already too late.
For students who were not anxious about mathematics to begin with, there was no relationship between activation in brain areas important for focusing attention, controlling emotion and maths performance. This shows that approaching mathematics may be entirely different for high and low maths-anxious students. Think about walking across a suspension bridge if you’re afraid of heights versus if you’re not — completely different ballgame.
The study also sheds light on how people who get nervous about doing math s can put their fears aside in everyday situations. When you let your brain do its job, it usually will. If doing maths makes you anxious, then your first task is to calm yourself down, even taking a few deep breaths can do.
