Investigating the Link Between Negative Interpretation Bias and Anxiety in a Mathematics Context

Mathematics anxiety is an important negative emotion that can impact mathematics achievement. Clinical anxiety research suggests that cognitive biases, specifically negative interpretation bias, can lead to the development of anxiety. The goal of this study is to investigate negative interpretation bias in a mathematics context, whether gender differences exist in this bias, and its content-specific and unique relation with mathematics anxiety. We analyzed data collected online from a sample of 240 undergraduate students that included two new measures of mathematics interpretation bias and scales assessing mathematics anxiety, general anxiety, and test anxiety. Students on average tended to have neutral to slightly positive interpretations of mathematics situations. Group difference tests indicated that female students tended to interpret ambiguous mathematics situations as significantly more negative, less positive, less enjoyable, and with more of a negative interpretation bias than did male students. The mathematics interpretation bias-anxiety link was content specific, with a stronger association found between mathematics interpretation bias and mathematics anxiety relative to the correlations with test and general anxiety. Mathematics interpretation bias was also uniquely related to mathematics anxiety, even after removing variance accounted for by general anxiety, test anxiety, general interpretation bias, mental imagery, and gender. Overall, our work adds to the limited but increasing research on cognitive biases measured in a mathematics context. Negative interpretation bias in a mathematics context is a promising cognitive process to study as research continues to search for important factors that play a role in mathematics anxiety and achievement.