Reading Skills and Reading Anxiety Symptoms in Youth

Many children who experience reading challenges develop co-occurring mental health difficulties, such as reading anxiety. The current study tested the relationships between specific reading skills (decoding, fluency, and comprehension) and reading anxiety symptoms. Participants were 230 twins between 8 and 13 years old. Multi-level linear regression models were used to account for family relationships and covaried for age and sex. Age was positively associated and sex was not associated with reading anxiety. Lower decoding ( β = -0.19, p < .001), reading fluency (β = -0.22, p < .001), and reading comprehension skills (β = -0.22, p < .001) were significantly associated with higher reading anxiety symptoms. When testing whether each reading skill contributed to reading anxiety after controlling for others, reading comprehension (β = -0.15, p = .010) remained significantly associated with reading anxiety symptoms, whereas decoding (β = 0.01, p = .90) and reading fluency (β = -0.13, p = .08) were no longer significant. Model comparisons followed a similar pattern indicating that reading comprehension (and to a lesser extent fluency) accounted for significant variance in reading anxiety over and above other reading skills, while decoding did not. Secondary analyses covarying for clinical anxiety and ADHD symptoms showed that the association between reading skills and reading anxiety could not be accounted for by these co-occurring symptoms. This study is among the first to examine relationships between specific reading skills and reading anxiety symptoms and highlights the need for improved identification and treatment of reading anxiety symptoms in struggling readers.