Shyness in Early Infancy: Approach-Avoidance Conflicts in Temperament and Hypersensitivity to Eyes during Initial Gazes to Faces
Year: 2013
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: 'Infant shyness', in which infants react shyly to adult strangers, presents during the third quarter of the first year. Researchers claim that shy children over the age of three years are experiencing approach-avoidance conflicts. Counter-intuitively, shy children do not avoid the eyes when scanning faces; rather, they spend more time looking at the eye region than non-shy children do. It is currently unknown whether young infants show this conflicted shyness and its corresponding characteristic pattern of face scanning. Here, using infant behavioral questionnaires and an eye-tracking system, we found that highly shy infants had high scores for both approach and fear temperaments (i.e., approach-avoidance conflict) and that they showed longer dwell times in the eye regions than less shy infants during their initial fixations to facial stimuli. This initial hypersensitivity to the eyes was independent of whether the viewed faces were of their mothers or strangers. Moreover, highly shy infants preferred strangers with an averted gaze and face to strangers with a directed gaze and face. This initial scanning of the eye region and the overall preference for averted gaze faces were not explained solely by the infants' age or temperament (i.e., approach or fear). We suggest that infant shyness involves a conflict in temperament between the desire to approach and the fear of strangers, and this conflict is the psychological mechanism underlying infants' characteristic behavior in face scanning.
Source: PLoS ONE
Authors: Yoshi-Taka Matsuda, Kazuo Okanoya, Masako Myowa-Yamakoshi
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,382
OpenAlex ID: W2094076365