ABSTRACT
Anxiety is known to dysregulate the salience, default mode, and central executive networks of the human brain, yet this phenomenon has not been fully explored across the STEM learning experience, where anxiety can impact negatively academic performance. Here, we evaluated anxiety and large-scale brain connectivity in 101 undergraduate physics students. We found sex differences in STEM-related and clinical anxiety, with longitudinal increases in science anxiety observed for both female and male students. Sex-specific relationships between STEM anxiety and brain connectivity emerged, with male students exhibiting distinct inter-network connectivity for STEM and clinical anxiety and female students demonstrating no significant within-sex correlations. Anxiety was negatively correlated with academic performance in sex-specific ways at both pre- and post-instruction. Moreover, math anxiety in male students mediated the relation between default mode-salience connectivity and course grade. Together, these results reveal complex sex differences in the neural mechanisms driving how anxiety is related to STEM learning.
Footnotes
Our manuscript revision includes several updates: 1. We revised the Introduction to include expanded focus and clarity on: - study focus and objectives - STEM-specific challenges faced by STEM students - the rationale for studying science, spatial, and math anxiety in physics students - the study sample, including course description 2. We revised the Results to include a mixed model ANOVA on sex differences in anxiety measures. 3. We revised the Discussion to included expanded focus and clarity on: - functional interpretations of the observed inter-network correlations with anxiety - study limitations 4. We revised the Methods to included expanded description of: - collinearity diagnostics - intra-network cohesion - FDR corrections for multiple comparisons 5. We revised the Supplementary Information (SI) to include: - additional details on participant characteristics and demographics - description of female participants exhibiting high clinical anxiety at pre-instruction - collinearity diagnostics - robust ANOVA on sex differences in anxiety measures - expanded visualization of correlations between changes in anxiety and changes in connectivity