They seem to be hypothesizing that the mechanism causing this result is that math anxiety can be transmitted like a disease, and lower empathy individuals are somewhat immune.
It would be worthwhile to figure out what makes math anxiety transmittable, and what other attitudes might be transmitted by a similar mechanism and lead to measurable impact.
They hypothesized this, tested for it in the experiment, and found no effect. Math anxiety was correlated with calculation skills (i.e. people who were bad at calculating were more anxious about math), but uncorrelated with empathy.
The hypothesis they brought up in the conclusion was that stereotype threat may be transmitted socially, and higher-empathy individuals are more susceptible. Stereotype threat is a known psychological effect where if people are members of a group that is believed to be bad at something, then their performance on tests of that will suffer, particularly if they are made aware of either the stereotype or their membership in this group before the task. It makes sense that higher empathy would make your more susceptible to this, but like the conclusion says, this requires further research to establish definitively.
A couple of years ago the inverse concept was claimed - that those who were told that they were good at a subject would do worse in a later test. The supposed mechanism was anxiety over living up to the expected outcome.
The conclusions drawn concerned praising students for effort and never for comparative achievement.
So, if you tell someone they need to try harder, ie they're underachieving then stereotyping makes them worse, but if you tell someone they're good then anxiety reduces their performance??
If both of these are true it suggests the best performance can be achieved by never giving students tests ... which sounds like a good outcome for fallacious reasoning.
That's one hypothesis, although they hypothesized this is true for the girls, at least specifically picking up cues from math anxious teachers. However, the social awareness isn't as strong in boys as they say, which lend more evidence to the hypothesis that it's most a "social distraction" thing. Also, they specifically found that Math Anxeity didn't explain the correlation between lack of empathizing and math achievement in their sample set.
Altogether, this seems to violate intuition on multiple levels. One hypothesis they push is that more social children are more easily distracted?
Another potential explanation is that kids with high empathy spend more time socializing, which is partly why they have higher empathy. And kids with lower empathy spend less time socializing, and more time on subjects they can do themselves, like math.
Note that the effect of socializing -> higher empathy -> better at socializing -> enjoys socializing is a feedback loop.
In this case, “empathy quotient” = how the parent answers the following questionnaire:
• My child likes to look after other people.
• My child often doesn’t understand why some things upset other people so much.
• My child would not cry or get upset if a character in a film died.
• My child is quick to notice when people are joking.
• My child enjoys cutting up worms, or pulling the legs off insects.
• My child has stolen something they wanted from their sibling or friend.
• My child has trouble forming friendships.
• When playing with other children, my child spontaneously takes turns and shares toys.
• My child can be blunt giving their opinions, even when these may upset someone.
• My child would enjoy looking after a pet.
• My child is often rude or impolite without realising it.
• My child has been in trouble for physical bullying.
• At school, when my child understands something they can easily explain it clearly to others.
• My child has one or two close friends, as well as several other friends.
• My child listens to others’ opinions, even when different from their own.
• My child shows concern when others are upset.
• My child can seem so preoccupied with their own thoughts that they don’t notice others getting bored.
• My child blames other children for things that they themselves have done.
• My child gets very upset if they see an animal in pain.
• My child sometimes pushes or pinches someone if they are annoying them.
• My child can easily tell when another person wants to enter into conversation with them.
• My child is good at negotiating for what they want.
• My child would worry about how another child would feel if they weren’t invited to a party.
• My child gets upset at seeing others crying or in pain.
• My child likes to help new children integrate in class.
• My child has been in trouble for name-calling or teasing.
• My child tends to resort to physical aggression to get what they want.
(For each question, answer is a choice among “strongly agree”, “slightly agree”, “slightly disagree”, and “strongly disagree”. In each case, the “more empathetic” side of the answers is scored either 1 for the “slightly” answer or 2 for the “strongly” answer, whereas both answers on the “less empathetic” side are scored zero. Overall EQ score is the sum of those.)
if this hypothesis is true then does that cast a shadow of doubt on their method which involved using a questionnaire given to the parents of the children to rate their empathy and systematizing ability. if social bias can hurt children's math ability then surely it can also contaminate the survey results.
It would be worthwhile to figure out what makes math anxiety transmittable, and what other attitudes might be transmitted by a similar mechanism and lead to measurable impact.