Many people experience feelings of apprehension, tension or discomfort when confronted by a math problem — a phenomenon known as math anxiety. Women tend to experience more math anxiety compared to their male peers and a new study, published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, provides evidence that this gender difference is related to anxiety when doing mental rotation.
“I was interested in gender differences in math anxiety because there is a lot of research that suggests that math anxiety negatively impacts math performance and may be a factor that discourages women from entering into STEM programs and careers,” said study author Véronic Delage, a graduate student and member of the Cognition & Emotion Lab at the University of Ottawa. “As a woman, I felt it was important to study this gender difference to eventually try to remedy it. I was inspired to explore the impact that spatial anxiety and ability may have on this gender difference.”
Spatial ability refers to capacity to understand, remember, and mentally transform dimensional relations among objects. Prior research has indicated that spatial ability is closely tied to mathematical skill.
For their study, the researchers had 125 male and 286 female undergraduate students complete tests of mathematical skill and spatial skill. The participants also completed assessments of their general level of anxiety, their math anxiety, and their spatial anxiety.
Delage and her colleagues examined three different types of spatial skills. Imagery ability was measured with an Embedded Figures task in which participants were asked to find a simple form embedded within a complex line drawing. Manipulation ability was measured with a mental rotation task in which participants were asked to identify whether two 3D objects were the same shape oriented differently or whether the objects were different shapes. Navigation ability was measured with the Road-Map Test of Directional Sense task in which participants traced a dotted pathway through a city map and indicated the direction taken at each turn.
Compared to men, women on average rated themselves more anxious about math, imagery, mental rotation, and navigation. This was true even after controlling for general anxiety.
Delage and her colleagues found that manipulation anxiety and navigation anxiety both partially explained the gender difference in math anxiety. The researchers also found that manipulation ability and math ability partially accounted for the relationship between gender and math anxiety. Of these four variables, however, manipulation anxiety emerged as the strongest mediator.
“Can you imagine rotating your laptop in your mind? That act is called ‘mental rotation,’ a type of spatial ability,” Delage told PsyPost. “What we found was that one reason that women tend to experience more math anxiety than men is, in part, because they experience more anxiety than men when doing mental rotation.”
“While this may seem a bit strange, many different types of math require you to ‘mentally manipulate’ the math (e.g., carrying a 1 when doing addition). This finding is important for a few reasons. First, it highlights that spatial anxiety plays an important role in math anxiety and, second, it contributes to the growing body of literature linking mathematical thinking and spatial thinking more broadly.”
The findings support the theory that difficulties with mental rotation contribute to difficulties with math, which in turn provokes math anxiety. But the cross-sectional nature of the data prevents the researchers from being able to draw this conclusion yet.
“The biggest caveat and important thing to remember is that our study is a correlational design, thus we cannot establish causal links between spatial anxiety and ability and gender differences in math anxiety,” Delage explained. “More research needs to be done to determine if the gender difference in the spatial domain leads to the gender difference in math anxiety, if maybe the gender difference in math anxiety leads to the gender difference in the spatial domain or if the two concepts have a bi-directional relation, such that math anxiety and the spatial domain influence each other.”
“I think the next step in answering some of the questions that still need to be addressed is to investigate these concepts in a younger population,” Delage added. “Gender differences tend to emerge during late elementary/intermediate school grades (4th-5th grade). Thus, measuring children’s math anxiety, spatial ability and spatial anxiety at several time points around this age could provide some information on how and when the gender differences in these concepts emerge and influence each other.”
The study, “Spatial anxiety and spatial ability: Mediators of gender differences in math anxiety“, was authored by Véronic Delage, Geneviève Trudel, Fraulein Retanal, and Erin A. Maloney