SHYNESS AND SOCIAL COGNITIVE PROCESSES IN EARLY CHILDHOOD: BIOLOGY, HETEROGENEITY, AND DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Shyness is an anxious preoccupation with the self in real or imagined social situations, and can be expressed situationally and temperamentally. Although state and trait shyness have been previously examined in the context of social cognitive outcomes such as Theory of Mind (ToM) and prosocial processes in early childhood, relatively little work has considered 1) the role of self-regulatory capacity in these relations, and 2) the longitudinal and transactional relations between shyness and prosocial behaviors. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this dissertation include empirical investigations that aim to address these gaps in the literature. In Chapter 2, I contextualized the previously reported positive relation between expressions of positive shyness and ToM by revealing that this relation may only exist in children with relatively high physiological self-regulatory capacity, as measured by baseline respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). Similarly, in Chapter 3, I demonstrated that only children with high temperamental shyness and low baseline RSA appear to experience the performance deficits that lead to relatively lower cognitive empathic response. Finally, in Chapter 4, I reported a longitudinal relation between early shyness and later affective empathic response. This study also detected a mediating influence of instrumental helping on this longitudinal relation. Collectively, these studies extend and further contextualize relations between individual differences in shyness and developing social cognitive outcomes in early childhood. This dissertation also considers and explores heterogeneity in types of shyness, expressions of state shyness, and prosocial behaviors; highlighting that not all shy children experience similar outcomes and not all children express shyness in the same way.