The relationship between shyness, social phobia and other psychiatric disorders was examined. The prevalence of social phobia was significantly higher among shy persons (18%) compared with non-shy persons (3%). However, the majority of shy individuals (82%) were not socially phobic. A significant and positive correlation was found between the severity of shyness and the presence of social phobi...

BACKGROUND Childhood shyness can predate social anxiety disorder and may be associated with biased discrimination of facial expressions of emotions. OBJECTIVE To determine whether childhood shyness, or the serotonin transporter promoter polymorphism genotype, can predict participants' visual event-related potentials in response to expressions of children of similar ages. DESIGN Study group ...

Shyness affects career preferences and other aspects of an individual’s life. Hypotheses that the researcher considered were that shy individuals have poor social skills, have low self-esteem, are indecisive about their careers, and choose nonsocial careers. The correlational design included the variables shyness, self-esteem, communication competence, career decisiveness and career choice. The...

This article examines the relation between adult shyness and sensory-processing sensitivity and posits a new model in which the interaction of sensitivity and adverse childhood environment leads to negative affectivity (with the highly sensitive being more impacted), which in turn leads to shyness. Consistent with this model, two questionnaire studies (Ns = 96 and 213) supported three hypothese...

This is the first study analysing individual differences in shyness–boldness and behavioural asymmetries in young zebrafish larvae (fry, 7 days post-fertilisation). Individual differences were more stable in tests with predator model (crude image of a fish face) than with an arbitrary novel stimulus (vertical black stripe). Principal component analysis revealed a dimension of ‘shyness’ that inv...