Fear of maths evokes pain response, study finds
The higher a person’s anxiety over a maths task, the more it increases activity in regions of their brain associated with visceral threat detection, and often the experience of pain itself, according to researchers Ian Lyons and Sian Beilock from the University of Chicago, writing in the journal Plos One.
The authors say previous research has shown that other forms of psychological stress, such as social rejection or a traumatic break-up, can also elicit feelings of physical pain.
However, they say their study examines the pain response associated with anticipating an anxiety- provoking event, rather than pain associated with a stressful event itself.
The authors say their results indicate that the maths task itself is not painful but merely the thought of it is highly unpleasant to certain people.
“Math can be difficult, and for those with high levels of mathematics-anxiety [HMAs], math is associated with tension, apprehension and fear,” the authors said in their paper, When Math Hurts.
“Interestingly, this relation was not seen during math performance, suggesting that it is not that math itself hurts, rather, the anticipation of math is painful.
“Our data suggest that pain network activation underlies the intuition that simply anticipating a dreaded event can feel painful.”
The researchers used 14 people with HMAs and 14 who had low levels of maths anxiety. They were asked to complete word tasks and maths tasks.
