Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jul 29, 2026

Assessment of Social Interaction Behaviors
Published on: February 25, 2011
Childhood shyness and maternal social phobia: a community study
1Department of Psychology, University of Reading, UK.
Background:
Family history data suggest the possibility of an association between childhood shyness and parental social phobia.
Aims:
To examine the prevalence of maternal affective disorder in a community sample of four-year-old shy and non-shy children.
Method:
By screening 867 children, 43 shy children, 59 children with another form of disturbance (i.e. fearfulness, feeding problem or conduct problem) and 26 children with no disturbance were identified. Interviewers who were unaware of child status used a standardised mental state assessment to determine the rate of affective disorder in the mothers of these children.
Results:
Compared with the mothers of the children in both comparison groups, the mothers of the children who were purely shy (i.e. shy children with no comorbid condition) had a significantly raised lifetime rate of anxiety disorder in general, and social phobia in particular. The odds ratio of a social phobia in the mothers of the purely shy children was raised over the normal control group by a factor of more than seven.
Conclusions:
These findings suggest a specific association between childhood shyness and maternal social phobia.
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