Word: shyness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...less of a normative way to get things done," he says. But children on the high-risk path appear unable to develop those social skills; their aggression ends up turning on them. "As children get older, in grade school, they slowly shift their aggression and tend to withdraw into shyness," Boivin said...
...mate for life (or, as scientists call it, "pair bond"). The brain releases gobs of it during orgasm, mothers are awash in it during breastfeeding and, in clinical trials, a spritz of oxytocin has been shown to reduce anxiety, increase feelings of generosity and even ease the symptoms of shyness. Conversely, researchers are beginning to discover that low levels of the hormone - or the body's faulty response to it - may contribute to severe social dysfunctions like depression and autism...
...commercially available on the Internet - new mothers sometimes use it to trigger the release of breast milk (and nearly half of all women who give birth in the U.S. intravenously receive Pitocin, a commercial version of oxytocin, to induce labor). But some entrepreneurs are already touting oxytocin as a shyness cure. One website hawks a "trust elixir," an oxytocin-laced perfume that its manufacturers say will make its wearers seem more trustworthy to others - and vice versa...
Oxytocin may be something of a wonder compound, spurring childbirth and creating love, but it's not exactly a performance enhancer and certainly not a cure-all - not for shyness or autism, or any other social dysfunction. "The nervous system is not just oxytocin. There are many other hormones that might be just as important as oxytocin that haven't been identified yet," Carter says. "A piece of social support is oxytocin. That doesn't mean that oxytocin alone equals social support...
Although their new movies feature drugs, Sir Ben and Apatow rarely use the D word when discussing them, as if willing pot out of delinquency and into mere dysfunction. For The Wackness, weed's a crutch; it takes the edge off loneliness, ennui or the shyness people feel around the opposite sex. Luke, the dealer, lives on Manhattan's Upper East Side and is on his way to college--his safety school, but still. In Weeds, Mary-Louise Parker's a pot dealer who sells to successful, bored, suburban business types. Even the protagonists of Harold & Kumar Escape from Guant?...