Word: shyness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...children and adults who feel constrained by their shyness, there are many ways to break free. Parents, first, must respond to their kids' timid behavior with empathy, taking care not to equate being anxious with being bad, says Dr. Regina Pally of UCLA. "They should send soothing signals that say, 'This is hard. I'm going to help you deal with it. You're not being a baby.'" For shy adults, cognitive talk therapy can place anxieties in perspective, lowering the stakes of social situations and reducing the fears associated with them. Behavioral therapy is a good treatment for social...
...would be a mistake, however, to think that therapy can eradicate all shyness--and it would be a bigger mistake even to try. Shy children may have a smaller circle of friends than more outgoing kids, but studies show they tend to do better in school and are significantly less inclined to get caught up in violence, crime or gangs. "Shyness has a risk factor," says professor of social work J. David Hawkins of the University of Washington in Seattle, who, since 1985, has been conducting a long-term study of 808 children from high-crime neighborhoods of Seattle...