ABSTRACT
Most research on attitudes to mathematics has emphasized the more negative attitudes that people have toward mathematics. Many people feel an extreme dislike, even fear, of mathematics including arithmetic. There are several assessment instruments for measuring mathematics anxiety in adolescents and adults. Some questionnaires, mainly including pictorial rating scales, have since been developed for use with primary schoolchildren, for example the Mathematics Attitude and Anxiety Questionnaire and the Children’s Attitude to Math Scale. The individuals with high mathematics anxiety tended to show less activity in the frontal and parietal areas in anticipating and carrying out mathematical tasks than did less anxious individuals. The people with high mathematics anxiety showed less precise representations of numerical magnitude than those with lower mathematics anxiety. Personal accounts by professional mathematicians frequently express intense aesthetic enjoyment of the subject; and sometimes mention aesthetic factors as contributing to their mathematical judgements.
