Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, L8S 4K1, Canada.
Child Psychiatry Hum Dev. 2010 Feb;41(1):1-14. doi: 10.1007/s10578-009-0150-0. Epub 2009 Jul 10.
Temperamental shyness in children is characterized by avoidance of faces and eye contact, beginning in infancy. We conducted two studies to determine whether temperamental shyness was associated with deficits in sensitivity to some cues to facial identity. In Study 1, 40 typically developing 10-year-old children made same/different judgments about pairs of faces that differed in the appearance of individual features, the shape of the external contour, or the spacing among features; their parent completed the Colorado childhood temperament inventory (CCTI). Children who scored higher on CCTI shyness made more errors than their non-shy counterparts only when discriminating faces based on the spacing of features. Differences in accuracy were not related to other scales of the CCTI. In Study 2, we showed that these differences were face-specific and cannot be attributed to differences in task difficulty. Findings suggest that shy children are less sensitive to some cues to facial recognition possibly underlying their inability to distinguish certain facial emotions in others, leading to a cascade of secondary negative effects in social behaviour.
儿童气质性害羞的特征是回避面孔和眼神接触，这种情况始于婴儿期。我们进行了两项研究，以确定气质性害羞是否与对面部身份某些线索的敏感性缺陷有关。在研究 1 中，40 名典型的 10 岁儿童对个体特征的外观、外部轮廓的形状或特征之间的间距不同的一对面孔进行相同/不同的判断；他们的父母完成了科罗拉多儿童气质问卷（CCTI）。在根据特征间距区分面孔时，CCTI 害羞得分较高的儿童比不害羞的儿童犯的错误更多。准确性差异与 CCTI 的其他量表无关。在研究 2 中，我们表明这些差异是特定于面部的，不能归因于任务难度的差异。研究结果表明，害羞的儿童对面部识别的某些线索不太敏感，这可能是他们无法区分他人某些面部表情的原因，从而导致社交行为中的一系列继发性负面效应。
