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Some of us would never go up and talk to strangers at a party, while others may prefer to work the room. As this ScienCentral News video reports, psychologists could see the signature of shyness imprinted in the brain, from toddlers to twenty-year-olds.
Bashful Brain
The more things change, the more they stay the same? Psychologists at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital found that this old chestnut may be true when it comes to personality traits like shyness.
It all started over twenty years ago, when psychologists studied two-year-olds that fell into two categories–inhibited and uninhibited. "Inhibited children were characterized by an aversion to novelty, an aversion to strangers, not liking things that were new, whereas uninhibited children were children who sort of plunged in freely," explains Carl Schwartz, director of the Developmental Psychopathology Research Group at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. The researchers created a small mechanical robot and wheeled it into the room with the toddlers. "The child who they categorized as inhibited would cry or freeze or run to its mother, whereas a typical uninhibited child would toddle up to the robot and poke it in the eye," says Schwartz. "They were immediately curious and were not put off by the unfamiliarity of that."
The researchers studied both groups again when they were in their early 20s, and this time they used a scanning technique called functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure their brain activity. While scanning their brains, Schwartz and his team repeatedly showed participants a set of human faces, one of the most important stimuli that we need to process from the very beginning of our lives, until the faces became familiar. Then the group was shown either the same faces they had just seen, or new faces that they hadn't seen yet.
The brain scans revealed that when they saw the new faces, those who were shy as toddlers showed unusually high activity in an almond-shaped part of the brain called the amygdala, which regulates emotion and basic instincts.
"We found to our amazement that we could still see this footprint of this very early temperamental difference after more than 21 years of development," says Schwartz. "The response to novel faces in people who had been inhibited in the second year of life was much greater than the response to novel faces in people who had been uninhibited. And we didn't see such a difference between the two temperamental types when we looked at familiar faces. When it came to faces that the person hadn't seen before, the reaction in this old part of the brain (the amygdala) was very different in these adults based on whether they had been that inhibited toddler who cried when it saw the robot or the one that toddled up to it and poked it in the eye and started to play with it."
This suggests that brain wiring for certain traits, like shyness, may remain the same from infancy to adulthood, no matter how much the shy person seems to overcome the trait outwardly. But Schwartz says parents need not worry if their kids are just quiet or shy. "We come in different flavors," he says. "If there are no people who are inhibited…there probably will be a lot [fewer] scientists, people who kind of look inward to some extent." In fact, Schwartz says that one of the shy subjects in the study went on to get a PhD in a mathematics, and one of the not-so-shy subjects became a tabloid journalist.
However, Schwartz does recommend help for extreme cases, like kids with social anxiety disorders. "If [parents] see that their kids really are showing a lot of distress in social situations, start saying that they don't want to go to birthday parties…that there is a more intense form of shyness that really is not your average shyness, this can be debilitating," says Schwartz. "There are treatments available for it and problems start to appear in late childhood, early adolescence. The earlier the parents can tune into them the better."
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