Anxiety about math is tied to low math grades and standardized test scores, yet not all math-anxious individuals perform equally poorly in math. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to separate neural activity during the anticipation of doing math from activity during math performance itself. For higher (but not lower) math-anxious individuals, increased activity in frontoparietal regi...

What do people think of when they think of “math?” We propose that individuals may have very different working definitions of the category of math, and that those with broader math conceptions may have less math anxiety. In Study 1, we introduce a method for indexing the “breadth” of individuals’ math conceptions, and show that there is an inverse relation between conception breadth and math an...

People’s fear and anxiety about doing math – over and above actual math ability – can be an impediment to their math achievement. We show that when the math anxious individuals are female elementary school teachers, their math anxiety carries negative consequences for the math achievement of their female students. Early elementary school teachers in the U.S. are almost exclusively female (> 90%...

Even at young ages, children self-report experiencing math anxiety, which negatively relates to their math achievement. Leveraging a large dataset of first and second grade students' math achievement scores, math problem solving strategies, and math attitudes, we explored the possibility that children's math anxiety (i.e., a fear or apprehension about math) negatively relates to their use of mo...

Although the detrimental effects of math anxiety in adults are well understood, few studies have examined how it affects younger children who are beginning to learn math in a formal academic setting. Here, we examine the relationship between math anxiety and math achievement in second and third graders. In response to the need for a grade-appropriate measure of assessing math anxiety in this gr...