Recent discovery of a “math anxiety transference” effect – wherein math anxious instructors produce underperforming learners, who are then more prone to math anxiety themselves – threatens to undercut math education's provision of individually- and societally-vital numeracy skills. While previous theorists have explained this transference using person- and content-based explanations, the present work explores a communication-based perspective via the novel Paralinguistic Model of Math Anxiety Transference. This model posits that math anxiety influences the way teachers speak during math instruction, producing anxious paralinguistic cues that, when detected by learners, produce appraisals of instructor anxiety, then elevated learner state anxiety, and finally worsened math performance and math avoidance. Methods Data from N = 86 highly-math-anxious, adult participants were collected via Prolific across two sessions, with session two exposing participants to either paralinguistically anxious ( n = 46) or paralinguistically confident ( n = 40) math instruction. Results Results indicated that paralinguistically-anxious teachers [H 1 ] were rated as more anxious, but [H 2 ] did not produce elevated learner state anxiety, and [H 3a-b ] did not produce differential changes in math performance or avoidance, relative to their paralinguistically-confident counterparts. Rather, participants in both the anxious-instructor and confident-instructor groups exhibited significant improvements in math performance and significant reductions in math avoidance from S1 to S2. We also tested for the role of time–pressure, which did not interact with the above effects. Discussion These results suggest that math anxious adult educators needn't be worried that their potentially-anxious speech will interfere with students' ability to learn. Moreover, they propose a low-cost, easily distributable medium of effective adult math education in an age of declining numeracy.

. The present study drew on our understanding of disparate long-term learning and memory systems to provide a framework for how HMA potentially disrupts specific types of math learning. Adult participants completed unfamiliar multiplication trials (e.g., 219 × 4 = ?) in two sessions across consecutive days. Repeated problems enabled retrieval arithmetic learning by repeating the same four problems a total of 72 times each (288 total trials). Unrepeated problems enabled procedural arithmetic learning by repeating a consistent problem structure but without ever repeating a specific problem (288 total trials). HMA subjects (HMAs) showed impaired learning of unrepeated problems suggesting that math anxiety may have disrupted procedural math learning. Conversely, learning of repeated problems was accelerated in HMAs relative to low math anxious subjects, suggesting enhanced retrieval learning. We interpret these results within the context of effort-avoidance and well-established learning and memory systems, suggesting that HMAs enhance effort on declarative memory-mediated retrieval learning possibly at the expense of efficiency gains in procedural memory-mediated learning of computational procedures. This work also suggests that the mechanisms linking math anxiety with math performance may differ in important ways from how math anxiety impacts math learning. Further, this work highlights the potential value of considering how math anxiety interacts with multiple types of math learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Math-anxious people consistently underperform in math. The most widely accepted explanation for why this underperformance occurs is that math-anxious people experience heightened anxiety when faced with math, and this in-the-moment anxiety interferes with performance. Surprisingly, this explanation has not been tested directly. Here, using both self-report and physiological indices of anxiety, we directly test how much in-the-moment anxiety explains math-anxious underperformance. Results indicate that in-the-moment anxiety indeed explains why math-anxious people underperform-but only partially, suggesting a need to seriously consider alternative mechanisms. Results also showed that while some highly math-anxious individuals-those with high levels of heart rate variability-experienced less in-the-moment anxiety, they nevertheless performed no better at math. For these individuals, math-anxious underperformance must occur for reasons unrelated to in-the-moment anxiety. More broadly, our findings point to substantial individual heterogeneity in the mechanisms underlying math-anxious underperformance. Accounting for this mechanistic heterogeneity may prove vital for optimally boosting math performance in math-anxious individuals.

Anxieties that are specific to a particular kind of thinking have been demonstrated for a variety of cognitive domains. One hypothesized consequence of these anxieties is reduced interest in pursuing activities and, consequentially, careers that involve the type of thinking in question in an effort to avoid engaging in that type of thinking. There is little research addressing this avoidance hypothesis, possibly because it is difficult to categorize pursuits as objectively creative or spatial. Here, we measured the perceptions that participants, themselves, hold about how much pursuits (careers and activities) involve different types of thinking. We developed a novel framework for calculating affinity coefficients, within-person associations between perceived cognitive involvement and interest across several pursuits. Having a negative creative affinity coefficient, for instance, means being less interested in pursuits the more they are perceived as involving creative thinking. Results across three separate cognitive domains (creativity, mathematics, and spatial reasoning) reliably showed that higher anxiety in a domain uniquely predicted a lower affinity coefficient in that domain, providing consistent evidence of avoidance tendencies linked to cognition-specific anxieties. These findings suggest that feeling anxious about particular types of thinking may play a significant role in shaping our interests, both big and small.

Anxiety within the domains of math and spatial reasoning have consistently been shown to predict performance within those domains. However, little work has focused on how specific these associations are. Across two studies, we systematically tested the degree of specificity in relations between anxiety and performance within math and spatial reasoning. Results consistently showed that anxiety within a cognitive domain predicted performance in that domain even when controlling for other forms of anxiety, providing evidence that cognition-specific anxieties are valuable for understanding cognition-specific performance. We also found that general trait anxiety did not explain a significant portion the anxiety-performance link in either math or spatial reasoning, suggesting that these anxiety-performance associations are not due to the propensity to feel anxious generally. Interestingly, while spatial anxiety did not explain any of the anxiety-performance association in math, math anxiety did explain a significant portion of the anxiety-performance link in spatial reasoning. These results suggest that, while links between anxiety and performance cannot be reduced to a single underlying general anxiety construct, there may nevertheless be overlap between domain anxieties. We end by calling for a more detailed examination of the unique and shared mechanisms linking anxiety and performance across disparate cognitive domains.