Sum of All Fears

Never liked memorizing your multiplication tables? You could have math phobia.

By Kaja Perina, published on November 01, 2002 - last reviewed on August 30, 2004

We all know potential doctors who are derailed by organic chemistry -- or even by pre-algebra. Many of these would-be M.D.s suffer from math anxiety, which takes various forms: Some students are paralyzed by numbers altogether, others do just fine on tests of overall competence but panic when presented with timed aptitude tests or mental calculations. "Twenty to twenty-five percent of college students I see have sufficient math anxiety that disrupts their performance," says Mark Ashcraft, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Cleveland State University in Ohio. "It's almost unbelievable that tests on such fundamental topics can be so upsetting."

Ashcraft stresses that math anxiety is distinct from anxiety generated by testing situations, but "if you're math anxious, there's a greater likelihood that you're test anxious and maybe also socially anxious." For most students, math anxiety escalates in junior high school, when students experience increasing social pressures.

There's also a cognitive rationale for why kids who ace arithmetic flounder later. Math anxiety, like generalized anxiety, hijacks short-term or working memory, as intrusive thoughts encroach on the computations at hand. Tracking a sequence of numbers, such as borrowing for subtraction or performing long-division problems require working memory, which increasingly comes into play in higher-level math.

Women are more likely than men to report experiencing "severe" math anxiety, though they may just be more willing to admit to it. Indeed, Ashcraft's review of 30 year's worth of literature on the subject, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, found that more men than women say they are "slightly" math phobic.

Ashcraft speculates that the American belief that mathematical aptitude is innate, rather than learned, is partly to blame. Teaching styles may also contribute to math anxiety.

In the first study examining how math teachers' discourse might encourage avoidant behavior in students, Julie Turner, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, found that students reported that they were afraid to ask for help or learn new problem-solving techniques when teachers were even slightly negative or failed to provide positive reinforcement.