Shy Children are Less Sensitive to Some Cues to Facial Recognition

Abstract

Temperamental shyness in children is characterized by avoidance of faces and eye contact, beginning in infancy. We conducted two studies to determine whether temperamental shyness was associated with deficits in sensitivity to some cues to facial identity. In Study 1, 40 typically developing 10-year-old children made same/different judgments about pairs of faces that differed in the appearance of individual features, the shape of the external contour, or the spacing among features; their parent completed the Colorado childhood temperament inventory (CCTI). Children who scored higher on CCTI shyness made more errors than their non-shy counterparts only when discriminating faces based on the spacing of features. Differences in accuracy were not related to other scales of the CCTI. In Study 2, we showed that these differences were face-specific and cannot be attributed to differences in task difficulty. Findings suggest that shy children are less sensitive to some cues to facial recognition possibly underlying their inability to distinguish certain facial emotions in others, leading to a cascade of secondary negative effects in social behaviour.

Impaired face recognition is associated with social inhibition

“…Studies have shown that shy children spend a longer time viewing the eyes of novel neutral faces (Brunet et al, 2009) and show reduced sensitivity to variations in the spacing of facial features (Brunet et al, 2010), suggesting they may not use global face viewing strategies when processing novel faces—in healthy adults, a global face viewing strategy, relative to a feature-based strategy, is associated with better recognition memory (Richler et al, 2011). Also, people with higher levels of social anxiety interpret neutral faces as more negative or threatening (Yoon and Zinbarg, 2008; Perlman et al, 2009; Jun et al, 2013) and patients with social anxiety disorder avoid looking at the eye regions of angry faces (Horley et al, 2004).…”

“…Although our study is correlational, and therefore cannot be used to determine directionality, several other studies have attempted to address this question. One hypothesis is that early developmental differences in face viewing contribute to long-term developmental differences in face memory ability—in other words, that high social inhibition results in avoidance of viewing faces, which leads to lack of expertise in face processing (Brunet et al, 2010). However, the existing literature currently does not support the lack of expertise hypothesis; instead, a recent review suggests that face processing abilities are present very early in life and are not the result of lack of expertise (McKone et al, 2007).…”

Specificity of impaired facial identity recognition in children with suspected developmental prosopagnosia

“…It could be the case that her face recognition skills improved with age, such that she caught up with the level of ability of her peers. In addition, her mother reported that she was a very shy child, which might have contributed to the face recognition difficulties she experienced in everyday life (see Brunet, Mondloch, & Schmidt, 2010, for evidence that shy children process faces differently to children who are not shy). This shyness may also have been particularly detrimental to her performance on her first visit to our research centre, but by the second and third visits she may have been more confident and so performed better on the tasks.…”

Shyness, Social Anxiety, and Social Phobia

“…Ten-year-old children whose parents rated them as shy had a more difficult time discriminating facial expressions based on the spacing of features, but not in differentiating faces based on the appearance of facial features or faces' external contours (Brunet, Mondloch, & Schmidt, 2010). Using teacher reports of 337 preschoolers' shyness in Head Start, Strand, Cerna and Downs (2008) found that shyness predicted worse facial recognition scores for angry emotions, but not for happy, sad, and fearful emotions as depicted in photographs, and shyness predicted less improvement in scores for all four emotions over a six-month period.…”