A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Shyness in Adults and Children

Abstract

Shyness is considered a universal phenomenon and has been studied scientifically for over four decades in different cultures, but considerably less is known about whether shyness measures are equivalent across countries, and whether different types of shyness exist and are conserved across countries. Chapters 2 to 4 of this dissertation include empirical studies that examine differences in shyness in adults and children from a cross-cultural perspective, addressing issues of measurement, specificity, and heterogeneity. I examined the measurement invariance of Cheek and Buss (CBSS) shyness and sociability scales, respectively, and further tested the mean-level differences in shyness and sociability between Chinese and Canadian young adults, respectively (Chapters 2 and 3). I also examined measurement invariance of the eastern created Chinese Shyness Scale (CSS) between Chinese and Canadian preschool children and whether the cultural context moderated the relations between shy behavior and the social anxiety (Chapter 4). In Chapter 2, I report that the CBSS-shyness measure was largely invariant and supported meaningful comparisons of average levels of shyness across our two culturally defined groups. Chinese young adults had significantly higher mean levels of shyness than Canadian young adults. In Chapter 3, I report that the sociability construct was not equivalent across our Chinese and Canadian samples. These results suggest that any mean-level comparisons using the CBSS-sociability scale among the samples were biased and ultimately uninformative, even though sociability scores were lower in Chinese versus Canadian young adults. In Chapter 4, I report that both anxious and regulated forms of shyness were identifiable and distinguishable in both the Chinese and Canadian samples, with differential relations between the two subtypes and social anxiety moderated by culture. Collectively, the findings from this dissertation suggested that culture plays an important role in the interpretation and expression of shyness and related constructs.