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

Math can be difficult. For some, even the mere prospect of doing math is harrowing. Those with high levels of mathematics anxiety (HMAs) report feelings of tension, apprehension, and fear of math[1]. HMAs underperform in math relative to their low-math-anxious counterparts[2]and tend to avoid math and math-related situations, which in turn can bias them away from taking math classes or even entire math-related career paths[3]. But what underlies the actual 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? Answering these questions is important for determining how to reverse HMAs' tendency to avoid math-related situations.

Interoception (one's sense of the body's physiological homeostasis[4]) has been shown to increase with heightened levels of anxiety[5]and thus leads to increased sensitivity to physical pain[6],[7]. Here we ask whether simply thinking about (i.e., anticipating) math can elicit a neural pain response in HMAs. Other psychological causes of pain have been reported, such as when one experiences social rejection[8],[9],[10]. Some researchers examining the overlap between social rejection and physical pain have put forth the evolutionary explanation that it is adaptive for a highly social species to place strong deterrents on anti-social behavior[11],[12]. Mathematics, by contrast, is a recent cultural invention, and hence it seems unlikely that a purely evolutionary mechanism would drive a neural pain response elicited by the prospect of doing math. Thus, math anxiety is an ideal test bed for expanding our understanding of how physically innocuous situations might elicit a neural response reflective of actual physical pain.

We hypothesized that subjective ratings of math anxiety would be positively related to activity in regions associated with the experience of pain (e.g., insular cortices[13]) while anticipating an upcoming math task. On the surface, one might assume that any pain experiences associated with math anxiety would occur during math performance itself: If someone is made anxious by something (in this case, math), then doing that thing may feel painful. However, as mentioned previously, mathematics is a recent cultural invention, so it seems unlikely that pain responses specific to math have been evolutionarily selected for. This means that any observed relation between math anxiety and pain would likely be more dependent upon one's feelings and worries about math (i.e., their psychological interpretation or anticipation of the event) than something inherent in the math task itself. Given that people have a greater tendency to worry – and have more cognitive resources available to do so – when they are not engaged in a goal-directed task[14],[15], simply anticipating doing math may be most likely to induce a neural pain response among the highly math-anxious.