UNUSUAL shyness in children may result from differences in their brains. Many researchers have suggested that extreme shyness, which emerges in infancy and often persists into adulthood, must have some distinctive signature in the brain. But the idea had not been tested before, because it is difficult to conduct brain imaging experiments on young children.
Researchers at Harvard Medical School have now used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brains of adults who had been unusually shy in childhood. When shown pictures of unfamiliar faces, these people showed significantly higher activity in a part of the brain called the…
