Word: shyness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...study published early this year, Dr. Marco Battaglia of San Raffaele University in Milan, Italy, recruited 49 third- and fourth-grade children and administered questionnaires to rank them along a commonly accepted shyness scale. He showed each child a series of pictures of faces exhibiting joy, anger or no emotion at all and asked them to identify the expressions. The children who scored high on the shyness meter, it turned out, had a consistently hard time deciphering the neutral and the angry faces...
What's more, when he recorded brain activity using electroencephalograms, Battaglia found that those with higher scores for shyness had lower levels of activity in the cortex, where sophisticated thought takes place. That suggested higher levels of activity in the more primitive amygdala, where anxiety and alarm are sounded. Shy children, Battaglia concluded, may simply be less adept at reading the facial flickers other kids use as social cues. Unable to rely on those helpful signals, they tend to go on high alert, feeling anxious about any face they can't decipher. "The capacity to interpret faces...
...children, he found, had one or two shorter copies of a gene that codes for the flow of the brain chemical serotonin, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in anxiety, depression and other mood states. Battaglia's lab is not the only one to have linked this gene to shyness, and while nobody pretends it's the entire answer, most researchers believe it at least plays a role. "People who carry the short variant of the gene are, in general, a little more shy and reactive to stress," says psychiatrist Michael Meaney of McGill University in Montreal, who just completed...
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...
...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 it's not easy to generalize those findings to the HIV-negative population, the study does suggest that shyness may take a toll on the immune system...