Comparison shopping is good financial practice, but situations involving numbers and computations are challenging for consumers with math anxiety. We asked North Americans (N = 256) to select the better deal between two products differing in volume and price. As predicted, math anxiety was negatively related to performance on this Price Comparison…

This study investigates the correlates of statistics anxiety. Considering that statistics anxiety and spatial anxiety have been separately correlated with related constructs (e.g., mathematics anxiety, academic performance, etc.), the possibility that spatial anxiety plays a role in statistics anxiety is explored. When facing statistics or…

Anxiety is a common affective state, characterized by the subjectively unpleasant feelings of dread over an anticipated event. Anxiety is suspected to have important negative consequences on cognition, decision-making, and learning. Yet, despite a recent surge in studies investigating the specific effects of anxiety on reinforcement-learning, no…

Anxiety alters how we perceive the world and can alter aspects of cognitive performance. Prominent theories of anxiety suggest that the effect of anxiety on cognition is due to anxious thoughts "overloading" limited cognitive resources, competing with other processes. If this is so, then a cognitive load manipulation should impact…

Anxiety prepares an organism for dealing with threats by recruiting cognitive resources to process information about the threat, and by engaging physiological systems to prepare a response. Heightened trait anxiety is associated with biases in both these processes: high trait-anxious individuals tend to report heightened risk perceptions, and…