Shyness

Emotional State and Personality Trait

The experience of shyness typically involves three components. Global feelings of emotional arousal and specific physiological complaints, such as upset stomach, pounding heart, sweating, or blushing, define the somatic anxiety component of shyness. Acute public self-consciousness, self-critical [Page 1490]thoughts, and worries about being evaluated negatively by others constitute the second, cognitive component of shyness. The third component includes observable behavior such as quietness, cautiousness, awkward body language, avoidance of eye contact, and social withdrawal. From an evolutionary perspective on emotional development, a moderate amount of wariness, concern, and caution regarding strangers and unfamiliar or unpredictable situations has considerable adaptive value. In addition, anticipatory social anxiety is functional when it motivates preparation and rehearsal for important interpersonal events, and shyness also helps to facilitate cooperative group living by inhibiting individual behavior that is socially unacceptable.

Situational shyness as a transitory emotional state appears to be a normal aspect of human development and everyday adult life. For some people, however, shyness is more than a temporary situational response; it occurs with sufficient frequency and intensity to be considered a personality trait. About 30 to 40 percent of adults in the United States label themselves as dispositionally shy persons. Three quarters of the shy respondents said that they did not like being so shy, and two thirds of them considered their shyness to be a personal problem. Almost half of shy adults report that they have been shy since early childhood. For those with early developing shyness, genetic and physiological factors play a significant role in personality development. Research studies of identical and fraternal twins indicate that the temperamental predisposition for shyness has the highest heri-tability in the normal range of individual differences in personality traits. Infants with this highly reactive temperament in the first year of life are more likely to be wary or fearful of strangers at the end of the second year, and they are also more likely to be described as shy by their kindergarten teachers than are children with an opposite, behaviorally uninhibited temperament. Retrospective reports indicate that 75 percent of young adults who say they were shy in early childhood continue to identify themselves as shy persons.

Slightly more than half of shy adults report that they first became troubled by shyness between the ages of 8 and 14, and they do not appear to have the temperamental predisposition for becoming shy and inhibited. Instead, late-developing shyness is caused by the adjustment problems of social development normally encountered in the transition from childhood to adolescence. The bodily changes of puberty, the newly acquired cognitive ability to think abstractly about the self and other people, and the new demands and opportunities resulting from changing social roles combine to make adolescents feel intensely self-conscious and socially awkward. The developmental peak for shyness occurs around age 14 when two thirds of the girls and more than half of the boys identify themselves as shy. Late-developing shyness, however, seems to be less likely to endure than the early developing temperamental predisposition. Adolescent self-consciousness gradually declines after age 14, and less than 50 percent of survey respondents who first became shy during later childhood and early adolescence still consider themselves to be shy by age 21.

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