Physiological Measures of Math Anxiety as a Function of Wording

Research on the physiological effects of math anxiety is inconsistent. In this study, an electroencephalograph (EEG) machine was used to measure the cortical activity of 6 volunteer undergraduate students while each memorized and recalled lists of both scientific and common mathematics words. A paired samples t-test showed that there was no significant difference in average cortical activity between exposure to scientific math words and exposure to common math words. The t-test did show that students who had high cortical activity when exposed to scientific terms also had high cortical activity when exposed to common terms. Further research is needed to clarify factors related to math anxiety.