Speaking of Psychology: Why are some kids shy? With Koraly Pérez-Edgar, PhD

social world. She’s also the editor of APA’s journal Developmental Psychology.

Kim Mills: Some kids are the life of every party and the lead in every school play, while others are quiet in class and keep to a small circle of friends. Because our culture tends to prize being bold and outgoing, parents often worry about kids who seem too shy. But shyness as a trait isn’t inherently good or bad. Today we’re going to talk to a psychologist who studies temperament in young children about why some kids are shyer than others, how shyness develops from babyhood on, and how parents and other caregivers can best support shy kids.

So how do researchers define shyness? How do genes and environment interact to shape children’s individual temperament and personality? Do shy kids tend to become shy adults or can our temperament change over our lifetime? What’s the difference between shyness and introversion? What’s the relationship between shyness and social anxiety? And how can parents help their shy kids recognize and tap into the strengths of their own temperament?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar, the McCourtney professor of child studies and a professor of psychology at Penn State University. Her research focuses on temperament in young children, especially shyness, and the links between temperament and anxiety disorders. She’s the author of hundreds of academic publications and has received many awards for her research and teaching, including Penn State’s Graduate Faculty Teaching Award and the APA Division 7 Mentor Award. She’s also editor in chief of APA’s journal Developmental Psychology. 

Dr. Pérez-Edgar, thank you for joining me today.

Koraly Pérez-Edgar, PhD: Thank you for inviting me.

Mills: In the introduction, I mentioned that you study temperament. How do researchers define temperament and what’s the relationship between temperament and a personality trait like shyness?

Pérez-Edgar: So there are three main pillars of what we would consider something to be a temperament. The first is that it’s early appearing. The second is that it’s biologically based. The third is that it is relatively stable over time. So early appearing means that for many temperaments you can see individual differences across babies in the first months of life. That it’s biologically based means that—it’s not determined by biology, it’s not determined by genetics—but what you can see, relationships with how the body and the brain responds to different aspects of our environment. And then relatively stable means that across context and across time, we see similar patterns of behavior in an individual. So those three things put together would put a particular behavioral profile as a temperament.

Now, temperaments can be seen as the foundation for personality. So personality tends to arise based on events that occur in your life, your response to those events and then how people respond to you. Your temperament tends to shape how those three things go over time. So that often some people will say that temperament is the biological basis of personality.

Mills: So what are the various temperaments? Are they the same as say the big five personality characteristics or those are not temperaments?

Pérez-Edgar: Those are not temperaments. They can grow into each other. So a number of individuals have done research looking at how does early temperament compare to or predict the big five? And those two constructs come from very different science traditions. So the big five came from using vocabulary and different understandings of what people were like to generate for now, five different areas of personality that people show in combination.

The temperament literature starts in infancy looking at behavior and looking at underlying biology. So what that type of research tries to do is say, how does a biologically based temperament match the personalities that we tend to see in our society? There are some similarities. So one temperament that we see is negative reactivity, the sensitivity to events in the environment. If that is coupled with early anxiety, early rigidity, that is similar to or predicts neuroticism among the big five. Children who show positive affect or high levels of positive emotion, they tend to have more of that open personality as an adult. So it’s not a one-to-one, but one can predict the other.

Mills: And so if I’m a mom, the temperament of my kid—I might notice shortly after birth that I’ve got an easygoing child who sleeps, or I’ve got what I would call a cranky kid who doesn’t want to sleep or is fussy, right? That’s temperament.

Pérez-Edgar: That’s temperament, yes. And then some temperaments will emerge slightly later. So when we think about temperament, there are two big components of it, reactivity and regulation. So reactivity is what is in the moment your knee jerk response to something that happens in your environment, a loud noise, a sound. Do you respond with anger? With a positive emotion? Do you tend to approach? Do you tend to withdraw? So that’s reactivity. Regulation is effortful. It’s your ability to say, okay, this is my initial response. This is my go-to move. Let me see in this moment, should I change that response? Should I temper it? And regulation tends to emerge later in life, right? Because you need those skills to stop, assess and if needed effortfully change. So reactivity emerges early in life with lots of different varieties. Regulation emerges a little bit later with the help and scaffolding of families, peers, and teachers. But they’re both temperamental traits. They’re both early appearing, they’re both biologically based and they’re both relatively stable over time.

Mills: Now you work with very young children and even babies in your research, how do you gauge a baby’s temperament? What are the techniques that you use?

Pérez-Edgar: So we usually start doing the laboratory studies of temperament at around four months of age. Our understanding and our assumption is a lot of what happens in those first four months are regulated by low level brain, visceral bodily functions, right? Sleep, eat, poop, right? That’s the cycle of the first three or four months. And you might have lots of babies with colic, for example. And it’s not until about four months of age that stable individual differences emerge. And so for example, for one type of temperament, reactivity positive versus negative, we literally place a baby in a car seat and we give them a series of sensory stimulation. So we will have them listen to an audio tape of voices that become increasingly complex and overlapping. We will show them a series of mobiles, very simple, something you would find at the store, soft plushy little animals, and we will show them one and then three and then five, and then seven.

In some studies, they give them things to smell on a cotton ball. And what you find is that for some babies, this is really interesting, they listen to the sounds, they look at the mobile, they sniff the cotton ball, and they’re like, Okay, this is an interesting place. I’m just going to see what happens. And for some babies, that very same stimuli pushes them over the edge, they cry, they fuss, they try to self-soothe. Some babies will try to flip over in the car seat just to try to get away. And it’s really interesting because it’s a simple mobile, something a parent might’ve bought anyway for the child, and it is just too much. It’s sensory overload. That’s where we separate babies out that are positively reactive and negatively reactive. How do they respond to novel social stimuli in their environment? Do they want to approach, positive emotion? Do they want to withdraw, negative emotion?

Mills: I want to talk more about temperament, but I think we’re here to talk a lot about shyness today. So let me throw that on the table. So when does shyness begin to appear in children?

Pérez-Edgar: So this is where it’s really interesting because my advisor when I was in graduate school would tell us that a lot of the confusion we have as scientists is that we tend to have a limited vocabulary. So we either use the same word for multiple different constructs or take the same construct and use a lot of fancy words to make it look like we discovered something new. So for the most part, shyness is a typical or normative behavior in young children. For the vast majority of children, if you take them to a new place, preschool, to dance lessons, most children hang back a little bit. They might cling to their mom, and then after a little bit when they realize things are pretty fun, they’ll engage, right? So that’s not in and of itself shyness. That’s the normal sort of reticence that you would see in a young child.

The most exuberant of children are the ones who don’t show that, that you could literally drop them off in the middle of a department store and they’d be like, Oh, look at all this. This is fantastic. Let me go up and talk to people. Right? That’s not the typical child. So when we say most toddlers are shy, that’s what we mean when we think about shyness as a trait, as something that really defines someone, it is moving beyond that typical clinging to my parent when I’m meeting someone new. It is that even as they grow older, 3, 4, 5, 6 years of age, they’re still hanging back. They’re still clinging, they’re still reticent to engage in new behavior and meet new people. That’s where we generally will then think about, okay, that’s a trait level, that’s shyness.

This is someone who considers being in a social situation and makes them feel uncomfortable before they’re in this situation. They’re apprehensive and they feel awkward when they’re in that situation. So we can label that shyness. Some of that shyness is temperamentally based. So negative reactivity can predict behavioral inhibition, which is in toddlerhood, the freezing and inability to engage with social stimuli. And that behavioral inhibition can lead to shyness. So some shy children are temperamentally shy. Some shy children are culturally shy. And what I mean by that is that parents, depending on the culture, inculcate shy-like behaviors because that is valued. And then some children become superficially shy because of negative experiences, bad things that have happened to them. So their response to that is to hang back. So similar behaviors can have very different antecedents, and part of what we do as developmental psychologists is try to tease those apart. Can we tell the difference between temperamental shyness, cultural shyness and then shyness that it’s a reflection of previous difficult events?

Mills: And based on what you previously said about temperament, it would seem that temperamental shyness would be the one that is most innate and not changeable.

Pérez-Edgar: It’s less changeable. I think one of the things we try to say about temperament,  is it is clay, and clay is moldable, and you can shape something out of clay based on the culture, based on parenting, based on relationships with peers. So it’s not always going to look the same. However, clay does have its own form. It has its limits, right? You can’t turn clay into glass, you can’t turn the behaviorally inhibited, negatively reactive infant into the life of the party, big man on campus without doing a lot to that child. So it’s moldable. It’s not infinite.

Mills: If you’re a parent and you notice that your baby or toddler seems to be shy, should you be worried? And is there anything that you should do?

Pérez-Edgar: I think if the child is capable of doing the typical things for their age and their children, no, there is no worry. I think the problem is sometimes our expectations of what we think are typical are not typical. So for example, if you take your child, let’s use the example of a dance class again, and you show up and you see the child that just lets go of their parent’s hand runs in happily is immediately engaged. We value that type of exuberance and confidence and positivity, and we mistake that for typicality. That’s not typical. Most children are slow to warm up. Most children will need a little time to get in there. It’s the very shy child who says, I don’t want to go at all. And it’s not that I don’t like dance, I don’t want to do any activities. I don’t want to do soccer, I don’t want to do swimming. When it inhibits their ability to navigate and negotiate their lives—because children have lives—that’s when you worry. But we want to make sure we don’t assume that the gregarious independent child is the typical child. That’s not the typical child, that’s the valued child in our western culture, but that’s not the same thing.

Mills: Now, what is the difference between shyness and introversion?

Pérez-Edgar: So introversion is more of a personality trait. It is often more studied as you get older into adolescence, young adulthood. The thing about introversion is it often looks at the way in which you gain energy as an individual. So some of us gain energy by being in a social setting, by engaging in activities with others that recharges our batteries, we fuel up. Those are the extroverts in our lives. Introverts tend to deplete their battery when they are in those big loud social settings and they go home, they sit quietly with a mug of tea and a book—that recharges their battery. So they’re doing that because they enjoy it. Being at home or quiet or being with one or two close friends, that recharges them, that is something they wish to do that is beneficial to them. That introverted side of them is making them feel good. The shy individual, the withdrawn individual, is moving back from the world out of fear, out of anxiety, out of apprehension. They are staying inside because they are afraid to be outside. And so that’s the difference. Are you being pulled in because it recharges you or are you staying in because you’re afraid to engage? And that’s where those two things, I think anxiety and shyness can interfere with your life. Introversion helps you shape your life.

Mills: Are shy children more likely to develop into teens or adults with social anxiety?

Pérez-Edgar: Temperamentally shy children? Yes. So what we can say is depending on how you look at the data, and of course data is always so beautiful because it’s malleable. If we think of the child who was behaviorally inhibited as a toddler, they have an up to sixfold chance of being socially anxious as an adolescent or as a young adult. And so that seems like a huge number, six times as likely than the average individual. If you flip the data a little bit, it’s a 50/50 shot. So about 40-60% of behaviorally inhibited, temperamentally shy children go on to be socially anxious. Depending on how you feel that morning, you can be very pessimistic, six times as likely, or pretty optimistic. And it’s a flip of a coin. Us as a developmental psychologist, let’s study and figure out why does the coin land on heads versus tails? And if tails is anxiety, what can we do to prevent that and boost the chance for heads? And so we see that we can trace it from the earliest months of life. And so that’s where we go back to look at the biology, to look at culture, to look at parenting, to again, change those odds even if ever so slightly.

Mills: A lot of your work is focused on the role of attention in temperament and in traits like shyness. Can you tell us how attention and temperament are connected?

Pérez-Edgar: Attention is very important. It is pivotal to development. It allows us to selectively choose what aspects of our environment we process, we interpret, we act on. And we—remember if you don’t attend to something, it’s very difficult to do those things. And we need to have selective attention. There’s too much happening in our world at any one time to take it all in. If we tried to, we would freeze in our tracks. It would be too overwhelming.

So the way in which we selectively attend to what aspects of our environment shapes what we call the experienced environment. So let’s take an example of a classroom. They’re in the room, two children sitting in the same location. They go through the day with the teacher and their peers. You can ask one child, how did school go today? And they’re like, Fantastic. We had to do reading time. We did arts and crafts. Everybody thought it was so funny that it was really hard. So what, we looked really silly, but isn’t that great? And we just laughed all about it. And wasn’t it fun? The second child, How was school today? It was awful. We had to do reading time. And so I had to sit there with everybody. And then we had to do arts and crafts and it was so hard. And everything I did looked so dumb and they all laughed and they all laughed at me and I could tell that.

So they’re taking the same events, they’re attending to different aspects of that event, and they’re interpreting it very differently. And so for one child, school is supportive, it’s fun, it’s someplace I want to go again. For the other child, it’s threatening, it’s downright mean. And why would I want to subject myself to that again?

So they’re attending to different things. They’re interpreting it differently, subjectively, and they’re responding accordingly. If you think something is good for you, you approach. If you think something is threatening, you withdraw. Both kids are being very logical. They’re just interpreting the world very differently. So if you have a child who interprets the world as scary, as threatening, as unpredictable, and my temperament wants predictability, and my temperament is sensitive to threat, well I’m going to react accordingly and I’m going to avoid that environment. So attention shapes our world because it shapes our world of view. We don’t live the same lives even if we’re sitting side by side with each other, because we filter it very differently.

Mills: How does the parent of the child who feels so negative about school deal with that? How do you help the child to attend differently?

Pérez-Edgar: Slowly and step by step. So one of the things that I think is really helpful, and a lot of schools do this just as an open thing for all children, if you think of it and you put yourself back in the mind of the five-year-old going into kindergarten, for us as adults, it’s very standard. We have in our brain the schema of what a classroom looks like, what school looks like, what the daily activities are like. It seems normal to us. That 5-year-old who maybe hasn’t been in preschool before or is going to a new school, there is nothing in their mind to hang on to what does my class look like? Where will I sit? What will I be asked to do? How does recess work? Well, what is recess, right? And the inhibited child, the shy child wants information, wants to understand what’ll be happening, doesn’t like unpredictability.

So meeting the teacher before school starts, walking into the classroom, physically laying hands on. This is where I will sit, picturing that environment. It won’t remove all of the anxiety or the apprehension, but it gives concreteness. And children, especially shy children, need that concreteness to then build off of slowly acclimating them to new things that scare them. And I think—this is the worst advice and I would’ve hated this advice when my children were little, mine are 19 and 23 now—but it’s don’t do too much and don’t do too little. It’s the Goldilocks, just right. And the analogy I use is sitting at the edge of the swimming pool, this child needs to learn to swim. God forbid they were to fall into the pool, they would drown. So it is up to you to teach them to swim.

You don’t necessarily want to pick them up and throw them in the deep end and hope for the best. You don’t necessarily want to say, Oh, this pool is scary, so we’re just going to sit here and get our feet wet and never get beyond our knees. The first probably will scare the child, and they’re like, I’m never getting in a pool again. The second will not equip them with the skills they need. We need to slowly get them in the water, slowly get them to paddle and slowly let go. And in many ways, our society requires certain skills to survive, and it is up to parents to give their children those skills. But we don’t just kick them out of the house and say good luck, and we don’t show up with them everywhere they go holding their hands. We scaffold them at the beginning and then we let go. Yes, we’ll take you to preschool on day one. Maybe we’ll stay for a little bit on day two, but then slowly one day we will just drop you off and we will go, because the child needs to learn that skill. And if the child doesn’t naturally learn that skill, then we bring in help.

Mills: Is it harder for shy parents to do this?

Pérez-Edgar: Yes, very much so. I think there are different ways in which parental temperament and child temperament interact that can make things easier and harder. There are researchers, for example, Andrea Chronis-Tuscano at University of Maryland who studies children with ADHD that tend to be loud, boisterous, exuberant, and not really well regulated or structured. And what she found is a lot of times their parent has ADHD. So getting the parent and the child in sync is necessary.

If you are a shy parent and you are not that thrilled with going out and meeting new people, you can have the tendency to say, Oh, okay, that’s fine. We don’t have to do the play date. You don’t want to do the play date either, right? I always tried to pick play dates with people that I knew so that I would feel comfortable, right? I think so if there are things that you have difficulty with that can make it more difficult for you to then feel empathetic for your child, if you are an exuberant parent, it might be completely unfathomable to you that this child would rather sit on the bleachers and read a book because that’s not who you were.

Mills: What got you interested in studying shyness and temperament? Are you a shy person, may I ask?

Pérez-Edgar: I think fundamentally I am, but my graduate advisor, Jerome Kagan, was one of the first to describe temperamental shyness, behavioral inhibition. And one of the things that’s very noteworthy about behavioral inhibited children is they’re slow to speak and they don’t speak much. But what he found is by adolescence, some of these children turned into parrots. I think what he noticed is that they were talking as a form of protection. They knew they were shy, they knew they had difficulty interacting with others, so they were just going to flood the zone. They were just going to flood it all. And so I do think I’m fundamentally shy. I have worked to overcompensate by trying to push myself into these situations, being socially engaged, being willing to speak up and be part of the dialogue, and then going home and collapsing and just putting my head into my pillow, as opposed to the people who really get recharged by these social interactions.

I think a lot of people are like that. The picture they show to others is not their natural reactivity. It’s the regulation. What people have found doing long-term research in the United States and in New Zealand—so for example, the Dunedin study in New Zealand enrolled practically every child born in Dunedin from 1971 to 1973, and they followed them over time. And one of the things they found is that early personality, early temperament, shapes—doesn’t determine, but shapes the types of careers they have. So the slightly shy, slightly awkward, slightly introverted person might be more likely to be an accountant, be more likely to be a scientist in the lab. The person who’s gregarious, open, loves social interactions, might be a salesperson working on commission. They’re both equally smart. They’re both equally good people. But if you had them swap roles, it would be a disaster. And it’s such a point of finding your niche and allowing individuals to do that. So for me, my niche is working in the lab, working with kids, doing a lot of typing quietly, and—when I need to—being more social.

Mills: Are there advantages to a shyer personality?

Pérez-Edgar: I think there can be. I think in the same way that in the western industrialized countries, we tend to try to make children more outgoing, to pull them out a little bit, there are a lot of parents trying to get their kids to slow down, contemplate, think things through, then act. The very exuberant, very surgent child often has difficulty with regulating the go, go, go. I think one of the things that the shy, inhibited child has as an advantage is they have the time to look, to observe, to pick up patterns, to build a knowledge of the world. That can be a little deeper than if you don’t let yourself have that reflective time.

If you look at the animal literature, so you can look at temperament in animals, right? Often they’re called neophobia. The neophobic rat, for example, is scared of new things. The neophilic rat approaches, right? Same thing with non-human primates. Macaques. There is a survival component of not running into this new environment and getting yourself eaten—slow and sure and steady. Now, if everybody in your tribe or in your pack was slow and sure and steady, you might starve to death because you’re unwilling to go over the mountain to find the new source of food. So most communities have a mix of the bold and the bashful, and it’s that mix over the centuries that allows that species to survive. The bold and the bashful humans allow our society to survive. We need both.

Mills: So just to wrap up, a question I like to ask at the end is what are you working on now? What are the big questions that you’re trying to answer?

Pérez-Edgar: One of the things we know about the biology of temperament is based on tasks and situations that we contrive in the laboratory. So for example, for the young child, the infant, we might bring out the jack-in-the-box and you have some children that are just thrilled by the jack-in-the-box. Some are terrified of puppets, right? Bubbles, climbing stairs, walking through a tunnel, things that we do in the lab to create risk and reward that tells us only so much about what happens when the child leaves the lab and goes to school or goes to the playground or negotiates daily life in the home with the parents and the siblings. So one of the things we’re trying to do is push ourselves technologically and conceptually. Can we see the world from the point of view of children and adolescents in their actual realm of being?

So can we measure their heartbeats and their heart rate while they’re engaged in social activity to look at sympathetic and parasympathetic activity? Can we have mobile eye trackers that literally let you see the world from the point of view of this child? Can we have mobile EEG or FNIRS so we can look at brain activity in the social world? Now, the problem with some of these things is they look really weird. So nobody’s going to react to you normally if you’re walking around with an EEG cap on your head. But to the best of our ability, can we do our work outside the confines of our laboratory? In the science literature, we talk about ecological validity. Can the things we do in our lab tell us about the ecology or predict what’s actually happening in the real world of this child? So slowly but surely is gaining more ecological validity. I think that’s the next frontier for us.

Mills: Well, Dr. Pérez-Edgar, I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been very interesting.

Pérez-Edgar: Thank you again. This has been a great conversation.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.