Early Shyness Can Be Overcome, Experts Say

When Harvard professor Jerome Kagan first stumbled on data suggesting an innate tendency toward shyness, he didn’t want to believe it.

Other researchers had been recording the developments and changes in the lives of a group of people for 30 years, following them from very early childhood on. “My team evaluated them as adults,” Kagan, a psychologist, related during a visit to the College of Notre Dame here last month. And then they compared the findings.

Some of the shy adults, they discovered, had been shy toddlers.

But he couldn’t propose a theory based on that one indication that shyness shows up very early in life. That was in 1962, and the second suggestion of innate shyness did not emerge for another 10 years.

In the early 1970s, Kagan’s group was studying children in day care, comparing them with children who were at home with their mothers all day.

Whether they were in day care or not, some very little children were “bubbly, effervescent, smiley types” and others “timid, cautious, emotionally restrained, wary,” he says. “This is the definition of shyness: In a strange place they become very quiet and they cling to the caretaker. They remain very apprehensive. They do not cry and scream.”

For the past several years, Kagan has been studying babies and young children in the Boston area, making videotapes of them at play, noting their behavior in unfamiliar rooms and with unfamiliar playmates. And these studies have confirmed the earlier finding.

“In the first 6 months, all babies will go to everybody,” he says. “From 7 to 11 months, there’s a universal fear of strangers. Then, in the second year, usually in the months before the second birthday, the children I’m talking about emerge.”

It is not a large group. He believes that 10% of children are basically shy and 10% are basically bubbly, and the rest range throughout a spectrum between the two extremes.

And even before the shyness shows, these children have problems that are more clearly of biological origin, he says.

“These are the kind of babies who have colic, who wake up a lot at night, who are hard to soothe when they are distressed, who have respiratory allergies, especially infantile asthma, which tends to get better as they get older,” he says. All those things can be traced to the functioning of the limbic system in the brain, which governs emotion and motivation.

So is shyness hereditary? Inborn and immutable?

Kagan does not go that far. All he will say is that the shy group seems to be operating under the influence of “a biological contribution, a little push in that direction.”

Some shy kids overcome it, or at least they appear to. Their parents invite other children to come to their homes to play, they go to preschools where teachers encourage gentle interactions, and they begin to shed their social hesitation. In their teens, Kagan has found, about half of them transform themselves into sociable adolescents.

On the other hand, some of the smiley, outwardly active children have had too many environmental hard knocks, and turn into shy youngsters who then grow up to be shy adults.

In our society, Kagan says, shyness is not necessarily bad--especially for academic achievers.

“These children don’t like to be in a gang of kids, so they stay home and read,” he said. “They have more time for homework, and they do well at school. They get A’s, their parents praise them, they become valedictorians and pick an intellectual job.”

They become writers, scientists, accountants, librarians; they work in places where they interact with the same people all the time. They have close friends, good marriages, stable relationships, professional success. Actors often claim their shyness drove them to performance, where they hide beneath the personalities of their characters.

Shyness can be painful. Shy kids who don’t do well in school add scholastic failure to social failure. Shy teens have a harder time with dating than others do. Shy grown-ups tend to avoid situations where they will be faced with a lot of unfamiliar people.

In fact, they talk themselves out of social participation, says Tracey Manning, associate professor of psychology at the College of Notre Dame and a consultant on human-relations skills.

“They tell themselves how awful it will be,” she said. “They think, ‘What if no one talks to me? What if someone comes up and wants to talk to me? What if the person finds me boring?’ They opt out; they back off from large parties. Or they scare themselves and trigger the fight-or-flight response. The heart starts pumping faster. The throat gets dry. The palms get sweaty. The digestive system goes haywire. They become preoccupied with what’s going on in their own bodies.”

And they look so preoccupied, so aloof and unapproachable, that other people don’t approach.

“People have enough concerns of their own,” Manning said. “The shy person looks like a snob, and other people don’t want to get rejected either.”

Or, someone does approach and tries to talk. But shy people are so busy “trying to handle their own fear response that they answer monosyllabically, and that doesn’t encourage the other person to stay around,” she said. “So what they’ve done is set up a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Manning is not much concerned about the origins of shyness. Her interest is in teaching people how to overcome their inhibitions and to develop the skills that others, more comfortable in social interaction, have developed on their own.

“I teach them to look at and challenge negative thoughts, to dispute them realistically,” she said. “What if you do have an awful time? What’s the worst thing that could happen, and how likely is it that it will happen, and could you survive it if it did? What if you try to start a conversation and get rejected? I tell people that’s not your fault. The other person doesn’t know you well enough to reject you for cause.”

She also helps shy people to change their expectations.

“People with social anxieties think they have to be the sparkling hit of the party,” she said, “but research shows that people like people who seem interested in them.”

So people who consider themselves shy should go into new situations planning to make at least one other person feel better. They should learn to move conversations along with leading questions, the kind that cannot be answered in one word, and then they should offer some bit of information about themselves in return.

“It’s not quite tit for tat,” she said. “But people aren’t going to go out on a limb for you unless you do it for them. Self-disclosure should be gradual and appropriate to the situation. You have to show that you trust other people, and that invites them to share themselves with you.”

SOCIAL TIPS FOR SHY PEOPLE

Are you anxious about going to parties? Have you been to parties where nobody seems to know--or care--that you are there?

People who think they are social failures may be sending an unsociable message, says Tracey Manning, associate professor of psychology at Baltimore’s College of Notre Dame. Instead, she says, they should try following the “SOFTEN” formula in Dr. Arthur Wassmer’s book, “Making Contact”:

S is for Smile.

O is for Open posture, meaning you should not stand with your arms folded defensively across your chest. Let your body language convey the impression that you are approachable.

F is for leaning Forward toward the other person as if you are interested in hearing every word.

T is for appropriate Touching. This one is tricky, Manning says. Research shows that when people have a tendency to like you, they will like you better if you touch them. But if they tend to dislike you, they will like you less if you touch them.

E is for Eye contact. If you are speaking, you have to look away every now and then to collect your thoughts, but if you are listening, eye contact says you are interested.

N is for nodding as appropriate during the conversation, rather than standing back, looking stiff and bored.