Demystifying math could ease anxiety

Demystifying math could ease anxiety By Erin Allday, San Francisco Chronicle Human beings have all kinds of irrational fears and anxieties about everyday objects and situations: spiders and snakes, heights and enclosed spaces, airplanes and needles. Math. That last one, in fact, may be very common, just going by the number of adults who freely admit to hating math or being bad at it. That supposed dislike of math, scientists say, may be disguising a real phobia that probably begins at an early age. Stanford researchers studying math anxiety in second- and third-grade students found that kids who were stressed about math had brain activity patterns similar to people with other phobias. When the children were faced with a simple addition problem, the parts of their brain that feel stress lit up - and the parts that are good at doing math deactivated. Interestingly, the children with math anxiety weren't actually bad at math - they got about the same number of answers right as their anxiety-free peers - but it took them more time to solve the problems. The good news, researchers say, is that phobias are treatable, which means there may be a way to cure kids' anxiety before they develop a lifelong aversion to math. "We already have mechanisms that are widely used to treat these other phobias. If the same brain system is involved with math anxiety, you should be able to use those mechanisms," said Vinod Menon, a professor of neurology and psychiatry who led the Stanford study. "What the math field might want to think about is doing this at earlier ages. Once math becomes a strongly learned fear, then it's much more difficult to treat." Anxiety becomes avoidance Math anxiety has been recognized among teachers and mental health experts for decades, although it's not typically a clinical diagnosis made by psychiatrists or psychologists. Math anxiety is rarely debilitating enough to require treatment - people who feel anxious about math probably just avoid it as best they can, researchers say. Adults who breezily claim to be bad at math may have had an early math phobia, and schoolchildren who chatter through math class or doodle on their math homework may be covering up their anxiety, said Kirstin Hernandez, a mathematics program administrator for the San Francisco Unified School District. But avoidance isn't the most productive way to deal with math anxiety, and many people who feel anxious and, in turn, try to keep math out of their lives may be hurting themselves in the long run, researchers said. Without even a basic understanding of math, they might not know how to find the best mortgage rate or calculate the tip on a restaurant bill. "Math has been for a long time seen as an 'elite' field. It's very OK to be at a cocktail party and tell people you're not good at math," Hernandez said. "But as an adult, I'm looking for a car loan, a home loan, I'm thinking about interest rates, percentages - that is not more than seventh-grade mathematics." In the Stanford study, published last month, 46 children were interviewed to determine their level of math anxiety. Then they were given functional MRI scans, which monitor brain activity, while answering simple addition and subtraction questions. Children who had high math anxiety also had increased activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with stress and negative emotions. These same children had decreased activity in parts of the brain associated with math reasoning and problem solving. "They're investing more resources in the fear part than the calculation part of the brain. But the kids have come up with another way to get the correct answer, even though it makes them nervous," said Dr. Steve Hamilton, an associate professor of psychiatry at UCSF. The results weren't necessarily surprising, Menon said, but he was interested to find that math anxiety had obvious effects on the brain even at a very young age. Mental health experts who saw the results noted that there's no doubt that math anxiety seems to cause the same brain activity patterns as other types of anxiety and phobias. That means math anxiety may be easily treated with techniques like exposure to the source of fear and cognitive behavioral therapy that work on other phobias. Kids and adults with math anxiety could learn to be less stressed by becoming more comfortable with numbers and equations, and by adjusting their thought process when they're faced with a math problem. Those are techniques that could be easily introduced in schools, Hamilton said. But many schools already focus on preventing anxiety in the first place by making it relevant and less intimidating. Teach reasoning No one knows for sure what prompts math anxiety - in fact, scientists don't fully understand what causes any human phobia - but the way math has been taught for years probably doesn't help, say scientists and teachers alike. Children are often instructed to remember processes and equations without a firm understanding of why those equations work, Hernandez said. "Human beings are born with numerical reasoning - if you want kids to split a piece of cake or pizza in half, they know how to do it," she said. "Sometimes when we over-standardize how to do math and take the reasoning out of it, it becomes confusing." The answer, say many teachers and mathematicians, is to demystify math. "You're forced to do something over and over again and you know nothing about it - wouldn't you be anxious too?" said Hung-Hsi Wu, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus in mathematics who has written a book about teaching math to elementary school students. "I believe almost all math anxiety would be gone," Wu said, "if every one of our teachers in elementary school was capable of looking in the 'black box' of mathematics and telling kids there is no mystery, this is why it works." Erin Allday is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. eallday@sfchronicle.com This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle, April 8, 2012 Read more >>