Word: kagan
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...good book to a loud party, you're not necessarily shy--not unless the prospect of the party makes you so anxious that what you're really doing is avoiding it. "Shyness is a greater than normal tension or uncertainty when we're with strangers," says psychologist Jerome Kagan of Harvard University. "Shy people are more likely to be introverts, but introverts...
Still, even by that definition, there are plenty of shy people to go around. More than 30% of us may qualify as shy, says Kagan, a remarkably high number for a condition many folks don't even admit to. There are a lot of reasons we may be so keyed up. One of them, new research suggests, is that we may simply be confused...
What determines if someone born with a genetic inclination toward shyness turns out to be that way? Environment, for starters. More than 20 years ago, Kagan conducted a study of 2-year-old children to measure their levels of inhibition--a tendency to retreat that often appears in children who later become indisputably shy. In collaboration with psychiatrist Dr. Carl Schwartz of Harvard Medical School, he then followed up on the children in their teens and again when they became young adults. Of the subjects who started off with shy tendencies, a full two-thirds stayed that...
...soap-bubble studies who resist novel situations tend to internalize feelings, which suggests that they are more prone to develop depression and anxiety later in life. Shy children are also at greater risk for developing full-blown social phobia, a serious disorder that afflicted half of Schwartz and Kagan's shy subjects. In addition, a 2003 study of HIV-positive men at UCLA showed that patients who scored high on a social-inhibition and irritability scale may have a worse overall prognosis than their easier-going peers, with a viral load fully eight times as high. While...
...pointing out that Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela were unusually reserved people and may have achieved far less if they'd been otherwise. "There's no question in my mind that T.S. Eliot would have qualified as one of the [shy] kids in our study," says Kagan. "Yet he also won a Nobel Prize." --Reported by Sandra Marquez/ Los Angeles, Mimi Murphy/ Rome, Sora Song/ New York and Cindy Waxer/ Toronto