(2 of 3)
In a study published early this year, Dr. Marco Battaglia of San Raffaele University in Milan, Italy, recruited 49 third- and fourth-grade children and administered questionnaires to rank them along a commonly accepted shyness scale. He showed each child a series of pictures of faces exhibiting joy, anger or no emotion at all and asked them to identify the expressions. The children who scored high on the shyness meter, it turned out, had a consistently hard time deciphering the neutral and the angry faces.
What's more, when he recorded brain activity using electroencephalograms, Battaglia found that those with higher scores for shyness had lower levels of activity in the cortex, where sophisticated thought takes place. That suggested higher levels of activity in the more primitive amygdala, where anxiety and alarm are sounded. Shy children, Battaglia concluded, may simply be less adept at reading the facial flickers other kids use as social cues. Unable to rely on those helpful signals, they tend to go on high alert, feeling anxious about any face they can't decipher. "The capacity to interpret faces is one of the most important prerequisites for balanced relationships," Battaglia says.
In a similar photo study at Stanford University, psychologist John Gabrieli went further, showing adult subjects not just pictures of faces but also photos of inherently disturbing scenes such as automobile accidents. The shy subjects, he found, handled the car wrecks the same way as the rest of the folks in the group; the difference, once again, lay in how they responded to the faces. "It's not that they were more fearful in general," says Gabrieli.
Faces aren't the only things working against the shy; their genes may be too. As part of Battaglia's study, he collected saliva samples from his 49 subjects and analyzed their DNA, looking for something that might further explain his results. The shy 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 a two-year study of timidity and stress.
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 way, but the rest overcame their inhibitions. "Parenting, environment and social opportunity--all of those had enormous impacts," says Schwartz. Notes Kagan: "If you're born [shy], it may be hard for you to become a Bill Clinton, but you can move toward the middle."