Emma Franchino

Luciana Ciringione, Emma Franchino, Simone Reigl et al.

Math anxiety poses significant challenges for university psychology students, affecting their career choices and overall well-being. This study employs a framework based on behavioural forma mentis networks (i.e. cognitive models that map how individuals structure their associative knowledge and emotional perceptions of concepts) to explore individual and group differences in the perception and association of concepts related to math and anxiety. We conducted 4 experiments involving psychology undergraduates from 2 samples (n1 = 70, n2 = 57) compared against GPT-simulated students (GPT-3.5: n2 = 300; GPT-4o: n4 = 300). Experiments 1, 2, and 3 employ individual-level network features to predict psychometric scores for math anxiety and its facets (observational, social and evaluational) from the Math Anxiety Scale. Experiment 4 focuses on group-level perceptions extracted from human students, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o's networks. Results indicate that, in students, positive valence ratings and higher network degree for "anxiety", together with negative ratings for "math", can predict higher total and evaluative math anxiety. In contrast, these models do not work on GPT-based data because of differences in simulated networks and psychometric scores compared to humans. These results were also reconciled with differences found in the ways that high/low subgroups of simulated and real students framed semantically and emotionally STEM concepts. High math-anxiety students collectively framed "anxiety" in an emotionally polarising way, absent in the negative perception of low math-anxiety students. "Science" was rated positively, but contrasted against the negative perception of "math". These findings underscore the importance of understanding concept perception and associations in managing students' math anxiety.

Francesco Gariboldi, Emma Franchino, Edith Haim et al.

Attitudes toward STEM develop from the interaction of conceptual knowledge, educational experiences, and affect. Here we use cognitive network science to reconstruct group mindsets as behavioural forma mentis networks (BFMNs). In this case, nodes are cue words and free associations, edges are empirical associative links, and each concept is annotated with perceived valence. We analyse BFMNs from N = 994 observations spanning high school students, university students, and early-career STEM experts, alongside LLM (GPT-oss) "digital twins" prompted to emulate comparable profiles. Focusing also on semantic neighbourhoods ("frames") around key target concepts (e.g., STEM subjects or educational actors/places), we quantify frames in terms of valence auras, emotional profiles, network overlap (Jaccard similarity), and concreteness relative to null baselines. Across student groups, science and research are consistently framed positively, while their core quantitative subjects (mathematics and statistics) exhibit more negative and anxiety related auras, amplified in higher math-anxiety subgroups, evidencing a STEM-science cognitive and emotional dissonance. High-anxiety frames are also less concrete than chance, suggesting more abstract and decontextualised representations of threatening quantitative domains. Human networks show greater overlapping between mathematics and anxiety than GPT-oss. The results highlight how BFMNs capture cognitive-affective signatures of mindsets towards the target domains and indicate that LLM-based digital twins approximate cultural attitudes but miss key context-sensitive, experience-based components relevant to replicate human educational anxiety.