The Relationship Between The Shy Personality, Life Events

Shyness, which is related to but separable from both introversion and neuroticism, is always described as a dimension of personality, a social aptitude, or an inhibitory state. The outstanding character of shy people is that they pay a lot of time on monitoring their feeling and behavior, and become restless because they afraid of making a bad imprission for others. Shy individuals feel uncomfortable and self-conscious and keep in the background in certain kinds of social situations. The fears shy individuals have are generally expressed about social situations—of being negatively evaluated and of being socially inadequate. Henderson and Zimbardo dinied shyness as discomfort or inhibition in social situations and a fear to negative evaluation, and is accompanied with emotional frustration or inhibition.This study adopted questionaire survey in order to explore interaction mechanism of personality, coping style and social support to shyness, and the influence of shyness, coping style, and social support to negative life events. The subjects were 1067 undergraduates.The major findings of the present study were:1. Personality and coping style had significant prediction function on shyness. Extroversion and resort had negative prediction function on shyness, and neuroticism, self-blame and illusion had positive prediction function;2. Coping style was found to partially mediate the relation between personality and shyness. In other words, on the one hand, personality directly affected shyness, and on the other hand, personality indirectly affected shyness via coping style;3. Social support was found to moderate the relation between personality and shyness. In other words, high social support can reduce the effect of extroversion and neuroticism to shyness;4. Shyness and coping style still had prediction function on negative life events after controlling personality's effect on negative life events;5. Coping style was found to partially mediate the relation between shyness and negative life events. In other words, on the one hand, shyness directly affected life events, and on the other hand, shyness indirectly affected life events via coping style.