The Studies Of Attention Bias In The Children Of High And Low Shyness

In the western countries, shyness was originally defined as discomfort, inhibition, and awkwardness in social situations, particularly in situations with unfamiliar people. In studies of childhood shyness, shyness was defined as timid and withdrawn behavior when exposed to new people. And the shyness of childhood has been suggested as a possible developmental precursor to social phobia. The definitions of shyness overlap with components described in social phobia, including fear of negative evaluation, interference with functioning and maladaptive thinking patterns. Therefore, shyness has also been described as a sub-clinical condition representing a milder syndrome than social phobia. Shyness does not only have cross-cultural universality, but also has ethnics and culture differences. As to the individuals at different age stages, their characteristics and incidences of shyness is also different.In recent years, most of the studies on childhood shyness in china and abroad are correlation studies with questionnaire methods. The behavioral research to discuss the inner cognitive processing characteristics is rarely used,though the experimental studies of attention bias in social anxiety individuals has been got many results. Shyness is a kind of psychological state which has many similarities with social anxiety in behavior and subjective experience, so it is reasonable to reference to the attention bias experimental paradigms of social anxiety. This research adopted questionnaire survey and behavioral research: at first we selected some children whose shyness is at a high level and others whose shyness is at a low level by Pupils Shyness Scale, then we investigated their characteristics and intrinsic mechanism of attention bias by using probe detection task and cue-target paradigm.The results indicate as following by the three experiments of attention bias:(1)The high shy children are more sensitive to the emotional stimuli than the low shy children at the exposure duration of 500ms and 1250ms, and the difference fails to achieve the significant level.(2)When the exposure duration of the emotional stimuli is 500ms, the high shy children were vigilant to the positive emotional stimuli, specifically to the positive natural emotional stimuli; the low shy children were also vigilant to the positive emotional stimuli, specifically to the positive social emotional stimuli, though the tendency of attention bias was not statistically significant.(3)When the exposure duration of the emotional stimuli is 1250ms, attention bias to positive and negative emotional stimuli was not found in the high shy children; as to the low shy children, they were vigilant to the positive emotional stimuli, and the attention bias was found in the positive natural and positive social emotional stimuli significantly.(4)Compared with the low shy children, the high shy individuals tended to avoid the positive and negative facial expressions at the exposure duration of 200ms, while tended to vigilant to the negative facial expressions at the exposure duration of 500ms, but all the tendency was not statistically significant.