PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Ariel A. Gonzalez
AU  - Katherine L. Bottenhorn
AU  - Jessica E. Bartley
AU  - Timothy Hayes
AU  - Michael C. Riedel
AU  - Taylor Salo
AU  - Elsa I. Bravo
AU  - Rosalie Odean
AU  - Alina Nazareth
AU  - Robert W. Laird
AU  - Matthew T. Sutherland
AU  - Eric Brewe
AU  - Shannon M. Pruden
AU  - Angela R. Laird
TI  - Sex differences in brain correlates of STEM anxiety
AID  - 10.1101/528075
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 528075
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/29/528075.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/01/29/528075.full
AB  - 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 but not clinical anxiety, with longitudinal increases in science anxiety observed for both female and male students. Sex-specific impacts of STEM anxiety on 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 impacts STEM learning.