Math anxiety is widely considered a potential barrier to success in STEM. Current thinking holds that math anxiety is directly linked to avoidance of and underperformance in STEM domains. However, past evidence supporting these claims is limited in important ways. Perhaps most crucially, it is possible that math anxiety predicts STEM outcomes merely as a proxy for poor math skills. Here, we tested the link between math anxiety and subsequent STEM outcomes by measuring math anxiety, math ability, and several covariates in 183 first-semester university students. We then tracked students’ STEM avoidance and achievement through four years at university via official academic transcripts. Results showed that math anxiety predicted both a reduction in how many STEM courses students took and, separately (i.e., controlling for one another), lower STEM grades. Crucially, these associations held after controlling for math ability (and other covariates). That math anxiety predicts math-related academic achievement independently of Math Ability suggests that, contrary to current thinking, math anxiety’s effects on academic performance likely operate via mechanisms other than negatively affecting math ability. Beyond this, we show evidence that math anxiety can account for associations between math ability and STEM outcomes, suggesting that past links between math ability and real-world outcomes may, in fact, be at least partially explainable by attitudes toward math. These findings provide clear impetus for developing and testing interventions that target math anxiety specifically and suggest that focusing on math ability without additional attention to math anxiety may fail to optimally boost STEM outcomes.

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Creative thinking drives progress not only in the arts but also, and perhaps especially, in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and it is expected to become even more valuable than technical skill as artificial intelligence outpaces human cognition. Fostering creative thinkers has become a primary focus of educators. Educationally relevant anxieties, like math anxiety, have been shown to substantially impact specific forms of achievement and engagement, both in school and in career pursuits. Identifying these anxieties has led to promising interventions to enable affected individuals to reach their potential. Somewhat surprisingly, however, the possibility of anxiety specific to creative thinking is, to our knowledge, unexplored. In this article, across multiple samples, we tested the viability of creativity anxiety as a construct. We first created a new measure, the Creativity Anxiety Scale (CAS), demonstrating validity, internal reliability, and specificity. Applying the CAS revealed that creativity-specific anxiety predicted individual differences in creative achievement and attitudes toward creativity over and above effects of general anxiety. Moreover, across diverse content domains, from science to arts, anxiety was greater for situations that required creativity than similar situations that did not. Notably, this effect was especially pronounced in women. These findings suggest that creativity anxiety may have widereaching impacts and distinguish creativity anxiety from anxiety about noncreative aspects of performance. Establishing creativity anxiety as a novel construct, and the CAS as a valid measurement instrument, opens a new avenue of research that promises to deepen basic understanding of creative cognition and inform development of interventions to enable greater achievement of creative potential.

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.