Patterns of Attention and Anxiety in Predicting Arithmetic Fluency among School-Aged Children

Exploring the Complexity of Children's Math and Vocabulary Learning: The Role of Cognitive, Dispositional, and Parental Factors

Early mathematical and vocabulary skills serve as critical foundations for academic success, yet the mechanisms underlying their development remain complex. This study examines the role of parents' education, children's attentional control, and learning approaches as predictors of kindergarteners' mathematics and vocabulary performance. Using a sample of 149 children aged 60-72 months in Shanghai, China, we conducted a path analysis to explore direct and indirect relationships among these factors. Findings indicate that parental education indirectly predicts math ability through children's learning approaches and attentional control, emphasizing the role of both cognitive and behavioral pathways. Conversely, vocabulary development is directly influenced by parental education and learning approaches, suggesting distinct developmental trajectories for math and language acquisition. These results highlight the interconnected nature of cognitive, behavioral, and environmental influences on early academic performance. Implications for early childhood education emphasize the need for targeted interventions that not only engage parents in fostering language-rich and cognitively stimulating environments but also support children's motivation, persistence, and attentional capacities.

Stress and Anxiety among High School Adolescents: Correlations between Physiological and Psychological Indicators in a Longitudinal Follow-Up Study

Mental and psychological disorders are serious health problems worldwide. Anxiety among high school students can affect school performance, relationships, and family life.

OBJECTIVE

Our aim is to understand the anxiety levels and associated factors among high school students and compare the results of psychological tests measuring anxiety with the cortisol levels obtained from biological sampling.

METHOD

In our longitudinal follow-up study, we involved 125 individuals in May 2019. Validated measurement tools were used during questionnaire data collection, including the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, Clear Communication Scale, Multiple Social Perceived Support Scale, and related HBSC questions. As objective data, we collected hair samples for cortisol level measurement.

RESULTS

At the end of the school year, the anxiety levels measured by psychological tests were significantly higher (p = 0.001) compared to the anxiety levels at the beginning of the next school year. Anxiety levels were higher among girls and were influenced by the type of school and parental expectations. Both state anxiety and trait anxiety showed a strong correlation with psychosomatic symptoms (p < 0.001) and anxiety arising from school expectations (p < 0.05). The changes in cortisol levels did not follow the changes in psychological tests. Cortisol level increased (p = 0.01) in the second sample.

Challenges in Understanding Numerical Learning: Editorial for Brain Sciences Special Issue “Neurocognitive Signatures of Math (Learning) across the Lifespan and Their Interrelation with Other Aspects of Cognition and Emotion”

Living in our information- and technology-driven society at the beginning of the 21st century requires the ability to understand and handle numbers not only for a successful career but also for coping with everyday life tasks [...]

Estimation Strategy Utilization Is Modulated by Implicit Emotion Regulation: Evidence from Behavioral and Event-Related Potentials Studies

A large number of studies have studied the influence of emotional experience on an individual's estimation performance, but the influence of implicit emotion regulation is still unknown. Participants were asked to complete the following tasks in order: idiom matching task, multiplication computational estimation task (MCE task), gender judgment task (GJ task), and emotional experience intensity assessment task. The words matching task was adopted to achieve the purpose of implicit emotion regulation (implicit reappraisal and implicit suppression). Behavioral results showed that implicit reappraisal and implicit suppression equally contributed to improving an individual's estimation speed (but not ACC (accuracy)). The MCE task related ERP (event-related potential) results showed that the influence of implicit emotion regulation on estimation consisted of two phases. In the first phase (encoding phase), implicit reappraisal both enhanced (larger P1 amplitudes) and weakened (smaller N170 amplitudes) an individual's encoding sensitivity, while implicit suppression enhanced an individual's encoding sensitivity (larger P1 amplitudes). In the second phase (estimation strategies retrieval phase), implicit reappraisal (but not implicit suppression) cost more attention resources (larger LPC2 and LPC3 amplitudes). The present study suggested that both implicit reappraisal and implicit suppression contributed to improving an individual's estimation performance, and the regulation effect of implicit suppression (vs. implicit reappraisal) was better.

Estimation Strategy Selection Is Modulated by Snapshot Emotional Priming, but Not Math Anxiety

The present study explored the role of snapshot emotional priming and math anxiety in estimation strategy selection. Participants were asked to complete a two-digit multiplication estimation task (e.g., 34 × 67) under explicit (Experiment 1) and implicit (Experiment 2) snapshot emotional priming conditions by freely choosing to use DU (down-up, e.g., doing 30 × 70 = 2100 for 34 × 67) or UD (up-down, e.g., doing 40 × 60 = 2400 for 34 × 67) strategies to arrive as close as possible to the correct answer. In Experiment 1, individuals' estimation performance was positively influenced by explicit happy priming (shorter RT (reaction time)), while not affected by explicit fear priming. In Experiment 2, individuals' estimation ACC (accuracy) when using the UD strategy was negatively affected by both implicit happy and fear priming, but their RT when using DU and UD strategies was positively impacted by implicit happy priming. In both experiments, the correlations between math anxiety and estimation performance (ACC, RT, and strategy selection adaptivity) was not significant. The present study suggests that fear priming was not always detrimental to individuals' estimation performance, and happy priming did not always universally improve individuals' estimation performance. Additionally, estimation strategy selection was not influenced by math anxiety.