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Trajectories of Observed Shyness and Psychosocial Adjustment in Children

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Abstract

Shyness can manifest as inhibition, fear, and avoidance in the context of social novelty and situations of perceived social evaluation. In the present study, 130 children (Mage = 7.6 years, SD = 1.8) participated in a videotaped self-presentation task across three separate visits spanning approximately 3 years in early and middle childhood. Children’s observed shyness was best characterized by two trajectories, including a high-stable class (19%) and a low-stable class (81%). Girls were more likely than boys to follow a pattern of high-stable observed shyness. Further, children in the high-stable observed shyness class were rated by parents and teachers as more socially anxious relative to children in the low-stable class, and boys in the high-stable observed shyness class were rated by their teachers as displaying more depressive symptoms relative to girls. These findings suggest that a subset of children display stable behavioral shyness, and this is correlated with psychosocial functioning.

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Notes

  1. Given the attrition rate by T3, we also examined classes of observed shyness using only T1 and T2 behavioral data. The results were identical, with the exception that the high observed shyness class contained 24 children and the low observed shyness class contained 101 children. Likewise, when examining the relation between observed shyness classes using only T1 and T2 behavioral data and the correlates below, the statistical significance and direction of findings were the same. Accordingly, we retained behavioral data from all three visits in our analyses.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) Doctoral Research Award and an Elizabeth Munsterberg Koppitz Fellowship from the American Psychological Foundation awarded to KLP, and operating grants from the Ontario Mental Health Foundation (OMHF) Grant awarded to CEC and LAS and from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) awarded to LAS. CEC’s participation was supported by the Jack Laidlaw Chair in Patient-Centred Health Care. We would like to thank the many children and their primary caregivers for their participation in the study. We would also like to thank Lindsay Bennett, Diana Carbone, Sue McKee, Renee Nossal, and Matilda Nowakowski for their help with data collection and coordinating the visits, and Alexander Greenberg, Annie Mills, Jhanahan Sriranjan, and Anna Swain for their assistance with video coding.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University, Room 130, Psychology Building, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON, L8S 4K1, Canada

    Kristie L. Poole & Louis A. Schmidt

  2. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

    Charles E. Cunningham

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Correspondence to Kristie L. Poole.

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CC receives salary support and holds shares in BCFPI Inc. which provides children’s mental health intake and outcome measures. The remaining authors report no conflicts of interest.

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Poole, K.L., Cunningham, C.E. & Schmidt, L.A. Trajectories of Observed Shyness and Psychosocial Adjustment in Children. Child Psychiatry Hum Dev 51, 636–647 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-020-00962-1

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