Math anxiety and attentional control: the role of focusing and shifting attention in math performance

Math anxiety is an emotional reaction that leads highly math-anxious (HMA) individuals to perform worse in math tasks than their low math-anxious (LMA) peers. The aim of the present study was to examine whether HMA individuals may have poor general attentional control, specifically impaired focusing and shifting capacities, and, if so, to what extent this might explain HMA individuals' suboptimal performance in arithmetic tasks. Forty-six HMA and 46 LMA individuals were asked to perform an addition verification task. The HMA group was slower and more error prone than their less anxious counterparts. The former also reported worse general attentional control than the latter. Moreover, attentional control was positively associated with arithmetic performance and negatively associated with math anxiety. Importantly, hierarchical regression analyses indicated that math anxiety explained a significant amount of variance in the performance of the arithmetic task, even after accounting for the variance explained by attentional focusing and shifting. In conclusion, the present study shows that although math anxiety is associated with less efficient self-reported attentional control, this impairment in general focusing and shifting functions is not enough to explain HMA individuals' difficulties during mathematical tasks.