From Janet T. Spence’s Manifest Anxiety Scale to the Present Day: Exploring Math Anxiety and its Relation to Math Achievement

Janet Taylor Spence conducted a great deal of foundational work establishing the negative relation between anxiety and performance. Spence operationalized trait anxiety by creating the Manifest Anxiety Scale, and she conducted numerous studies linking scores on this scale to performance across a variety of cognitive tasks. The field of math anxiety research has built from her work to examine the ways in which negative emotions regarding math can hinder math performance. We discuss the antecedents and development of math anxiety, as well as the ways in which other individual differences, such as working memory, affect the relation between anxiety and performance. Although a rich literature has sprung from Spence’s early work, there is much left to do in terms of fully understanding how specific types of anxiety interact with each other, as well as with other individual differences, to determine performance outcomes.