Testing the specificity of links between anxiety and performance within mathematics and spatial reasoning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anxiety within the domains of math and spatial reasoning have consistently been shown to predict performance within those domains. However, little work has focused on how specific these associations are. Across two studies, we systematically tested the degree of specificity in relations between anxiety and performance within math and spatial reasoning. Results consistently showed that anxiety within a cognitive domain predicted performance in that domain even when controlling for other forms of anxiety, providing evidence that cognition-specific anxieties are valuable for understanding cognition-specific performance. We also found that general trait anxiety did not explain a significant portion the anxiety-performance link in either math or spatial reasoning, suggesting that these anxiety-performance associations are not due to the propensity to feel anxious generally. Interestingly, while spatial anxiety did not explain any of the anxiety-performance association in math, math anxiety did explain a significant portion of the anxiety-performance link in spatial reasoning. These results suggest that, while links between anxiety and performance cannot be reduced to a single underlying general anxiety construct, there may nevertheless be overlap between domain anxieties. We end by calling for a more detailed examination of the unique and shared mechanisms linking anxiety and performance across disparate cognitive domains.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".