Math Anxiety Doesn’t Sink Students Directly, Study Finds Resilience and Perfectionism Are the Hidden Pathways

Mathematics anxiety is one of the most widely documented obstacles to academic success, a creeping sense of tension and dread that can derail even capable students the moment numbers appear on a page. But a new study suggests that the damage anxiety inflicts on students’ day-to-day academic endurance may not be as direct as researchers once assumed. Instead, the effect appears to travel through two psychological intermediaries: how resilient students feel when mathematics gets difficult, and how perfectionistic they are about their academic performance. The finding, published in Discover Psychology, reframes math anxiety less as a single crushing force and more as a pressure that works indirectly, eroding the internal buffers that keep students afloat.

The research, conducted by Elif Esra Arıkan of Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University in Türkiye, focused on a psychological trait known as academic buoyancy. Coined in the educational psychology literature, buoyancy describes a student’s capacity to withstand the ordinary pressures of schooling, the looming deadline, the disappointing grade, the difficult exam, without spiraling into prolonged disengagement. Unlike resilience in its broader sense, which concerns recovery from major adversity, buoyancy is about the routine turbulence of academic life. Students high in buoyancy bounce back from a poor test result within days; students low in buoyancy may carry that setback for weeks, letting it contaminate their motivation across subjects.

To probe how math anxiety relates to this buoyancy, Arıkan surveyed 422 university students enrolled at public and foundation universities in Türkiye, with a mean age of 20.76 years. The sample included 314 male participants, roughly 74.4 percent, and 108 female participants, about 25.6 percent. Each participant completed measures assessing four constructs: mathematics anxiety, mathematics resilience, academic perfectionism, and academic buoyancy. The study received ethics approval from the Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University Scientific Research and Ethical Review Board and was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with informed consent obtained from all participants.

The first layer of analysis was correlational, and it mapped a coherent emotional geography. Academic buoyancy was negatively associated with mathematics anxiety, meaning that students who reported more anxiety about mathematics tended to report less capacity to shrug off everyday academic setbacks. Buoyancy was also negatively associated with academic perfectionism, suggesting that students with rigid, fault-focused standards for their work were less able to recover smoothly from routine academic friction. On the positive side, buoyancy rose alongside mathematics resilience: students who believed they could persist through mathematical difficulty reported greater everyday academic steadiness.

The correlations involving mathematics anxiety itself completed the picture. Anxiety was positively associated with academic perfectionism, consistent with the idea that fear of failure in mathematics often coexists with, and may feed, perfectionistic self-demands. Anxiety was negatively associated with mathematics resilience, indicating that anxious students tended to doubt their capacity to push through mathematical challenges. Taken together, these bivariate relationships suggested a plausible chain: mathematics anxiety might lower buoyancy by simultaneously weakening resilience and inflating perfectionism, two changes that each independently pull buoyancy downward.

But correlation alone cannot establish that such a chain exists, which is where the study’s second analytical layer comes in. Arıkan employed structural equation modeling, a statistical framework that allows researchers to test whether an observed pattern of relationships is consistent with a hypothesized causal architecture. In this case, the model positioned mathematics anxiety as the starting point, mathematics resilience and academic perfectionism as parallel mediators, and academic buoyancy as the outcome. The technique estimates both direct paths, from anxiety straight to buoyancy, and indirect paths, from anxiety through each mediator to buoyancy, and evaluates whether the overall model fits the observed data.

The results were striking in one particular respect. Both mediators performed as hypothesized: mathematics resilience and academic perfectionism each significantly mediated the relationship between mathematics anxiety and academic buoyancy. In other words, a substantial portion of anxiety’s apparent influence on buoyancy could be accounted for by the fact that anxious students were less resilient in mathematics and more perfectionistic, and that these two states in turn predicted lower buoyancy. Yet the direct effect of mathematics anxiety on academic buoyancy was found to be non-significant. Once the two mediators were accounted for, anxiety by itself no longer predicted buoyancy at all.

That null direct effect is arguably the study’s most consequential finding, because it implies that mathematics anxiety may not damage students’ everyday academic endurance on its own. Rather, its influence appears to be channeled through psychological mechanisms, diminished resilience and heightened perfectionistic tendencies, that do the actual harm. This is a full mediation pattern, and it carries a hopeful implication: if anxiety’s damage runs through modifiable intermediaries, then interventions targeting those intermediaries might protect students even when their anxiety itself remains stubbornly resistant to change. Teaching students to persist through mathematical struggle, or softening the perfectionistic standards that turn every error into a catastrophe, could in principle break the chain between anxiety and buoyancy.

The findings arrive amid growing international concern about mathematics anxiety, which studies across many countries have linked to avoidance of quantitative coursework, reduced participation in STEM fields, and diminished working-memory capacity during problem solving. Much of that literature has focused on anxiety’s effects on performance and achievement. This study shifts the lens to a different outcome, academic buoyancy, and to the machinery that connects the two. It suggests that the everyday consequences of math anxiety are not monolithic but are filtered through students’ beliefs about their own resilience and their standards for their own work, a nuance that could matter for how educators design support programs.

Several caveats temper the conclusions. The study is cross-sectional, capturing all variables at a single point in time, so the direction of the pathways, while modeled as running from anxiety to the mediators to buoyancy, cannot be definitively established; it is equally plausible that low buoyancy feeds anxiety, or that the relationships are reciprocal. The sample, drawn from Turkish universities and heavily male, may limit generalizability to other populations and educational systems. And the data rely on self-report measures, which are subject to the usual biases. Still, the study’s core message stands as an invitation for longitudinal and experimental work: the route from math anxiety to academic fragility may run through resilience and perfectionism, and that route, unlike anxiety itself, may be one educators can actually reroute.

Subject of Research: The mediating roles of mathematics resilience and academic perfectionism in the link between mathematics anxiety and academic buoyancy among university students

Article Title: Examining the mediating roles of mathematics resilience and academic perfectionism in the relationship between mathematics anxiety and academic buoyancy

Article References: Arıkan, E. E. (2026). Examining the mediating roles of mathematics resilience and academic perfectionism in the relationship between mathematics anxiety and academic buoyancy. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00930-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00930-1

Keywords: mathematics anxiety, academic buoyancy, mathematics resilience, academic perfectionism, structural equation modeling, educational psychology, university students, mediation analysis, Türkiye, STEM education, stress and resilience, mental health