Reading Anxiety in Children and Adolescents and Its Negative Association With Word Reading Performance

Over the past decade, research on reading development and reading disorders has expanded beyond its traditional focus on cognitive-linguistic factors to give increasing attention to socioemotional functioning. The present study leveraged two existing datasets (112 elementary school children aged 7 to 10 years and 110 early-and-mid adolescents aged 11 to 15 years) to examine various dimensions of reading anxiety (RA), including cognitive symptoms, physiological symptoms, and behavioral avoidance, as well as the overall RA effects. Our findings revealed that (1) RA was prevalent among both children and adolescents, although correlations among RA dimensions were stronger in adolescents than in children, (2) higher RA was moderately associated with lower word reading performance in both age groups, (3) no significant differences in RA were observed between children and adolescents or between girls and boys, and effects were not moderated by reading performance, and, lastly, (4) RA was negatively associated with reading performance across levels of reading ability, and this association was not stronger among readers at the lower end of the distribution. These findings reinforce the observed moderate negative association between RA and reading performance in prior research and suggest that RA may affect individuals across reading levels and developmental periods.