Date of Award:

5-2026

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

Psychology

Committee Chair(s)

Kerry E. Jordan

Committee

Kerry E. Jordan

Committee

Jessica F. Shumway

Committee

Greg L. Callan

Committee

Michael P. Twohig

Committee

Amy L. Odum

Abstract

Math anxiety is characterized by feelings of discomfort or distress that are triggered when an individual is tasked with using numbers. Math anxiety impacts people at all ages, from early elementary school into adulthood (for review see Ramirez et al., 2018). In these studies, we investigated the cognitive impact that math anxiety has on both children and adults by measuring their math anxiety and reaction time on two tasks. The first task was the arithmetic affective priming task (AAPT), which purportedly shows that those with math anxiety tend to complete math tasks more efficiently (faster) when they are primed to feel negatively (Rubinsten & Tannock, 2010; Rubinsten et al., 2012). Previous work with this task showed the opposite effect, that being primed negatively causes slower reaction times for those with math anxiety (Hartmann et al., in press). Based on these mismatched results, we decided to consider the role that attentional bias plays while people interact with math by administering the emotional Stroop task. This task posits that those exposed to stimuli related to what makes them feel negative, in this case math, will react more slowly to the target task of identifying the color stimuli are written in than to neutral stimuli. We expected participants with high math anxiety to show evidence of attentional bias on the emotional Stroop task and consistent with previously seen patterns on the AAPT. In adults we found no evidence of an attentional bias effect, and the AAPT did not reveal any pattern consistent with previous findings. For children a similar negative result was found, with no indication of attentional bias or affective priming effects related to math anxiety. A secondary goal of the study with the child sample was to examine the parent-child math anxiety relationship. A model was built to analyze variables related to homelife and parent characteristics that may be relevant to the development of child math anxiety. The model revealed significant results indicating that household income level and how many hours a week parents helped their children with math school work has an impact on child math anxiety.

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