Though schoolgirls on average are more successful academically than young boys, they may pay a psychological price, University of Illinois researchers report.
Their findings are based on studying attitudes among 932 children in the 4th, 5th and 6th grades. It looked at performance in school and self-reports from the youngsters as to how they felt about themselves and their efforts.
To a greater extent than the boys, girls seemed to have feelings of worry, anxiety and depression, the authors wrote in the Journal of Educational Psychology.
"Although girls may have the edge over boys in terms of their performance in school, this edge is lost when it comes to the experience of internal distress," the psychologists said.
This finding may help explain why girls don't go into careers in engineering and science to the same extent as boys.
"If a girl gets to college and wonders, 'Should I go for advanced physics?' the question 'Can I handle it?' becomes a major hurdle," said Eva Pomerantz, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.