The researchers scanned the brains of two groups of children while they were doing math problems.
They found that the more anxious children are about math, the slower they start to do problems, and the more difficult it is to solve them. Children with math anxiety disorder are less active in brain regions related to working memory and numerical reasoning.
20 12 1 1 month, a study shows that fear of mathematics can activate brain regions related to physical pain. Ian Lyons and Sean Bayloc, researchers at the University of Chicago in the United States, wrote in PLoS-Comprehensive that the more anxious a person is about a math task, the more active the brain regions related to visceral threat detection are.
The authors of these studies say that previous studies have shown that other types of psychological stress, such as social exclusion or traumatic mental breakdown, can also lead to feelings of physical pain. But in this new study, they analyzed the pain response related to the premonition of anxiety-induced events, rather than the pain related to the stress events themselves. These researchers say that their results show that the math task itself is not painful, but thinking about it will make some people very unhappy.
They said in a research report entitled "Mathematical Injury": "Mathematics may be difficult. For people with high math anxiety, math is related to nervousness, anxiety and fear. Interestingly, this relationship will not be reflected in math scores, that is to say, mathematics itself will not cause harm, but the premonition of mathematics is unpleasant. Our research shows that activating the pain network will make people have a painful intuition that something terrible will happen. These results can provide a potential neural mechanism to explain why patients with high math anxiety tend to avoid math and math-related situations. We provided the earliest neural evidence to show the nature of subjective experience of mathematical anxiety. "