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Children's shyness and early stages of emotional face processing

Kristie L Poole1, Teena Willoughby1

  • 1Brock University, Canada.

Biological Psychology
|March 9, 2024
PubMed

Insights

Shy children show distinct brain responses to angry and fearful faces. Higher shyness correlates with early brain wave (P100) changes, while lower shyness relates to later brain wave (N170) changes when viewing threat cues.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental psychology
  • Cognitive neuroscience
  • Social neuroscience

Background:

  • Early facial emotion recognition is crucial for social interaction.
  • Individual differences in temperament, like shyness, may impact this development.
  • Limited research exists on how shyness influences early emotional face processing.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the relationship between temperamental shyness and early neural processing of facial emotions in children.
  • To examine how shyness affects event-related potentials (P100 and N170) in response to neutral, angry, fearful, and happy facial expressions.
  • To determine if shyness specifically influences the processing of threat-related facial cues.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized a sample of 419 children (mean age 10.57 years).
  • Assessed temperamental shyness.
  • Measured early emotional face processing using P100 and N170 event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to various facial expressions (neutral, anger, fear, happy).

Main Results:

  • Higher temperamental shyness was associated with increased P100 activation to angry and fearful faces compared to neutral faces.
  • Lower temperamental shyness was associated with increased N170 activation to angry and fearful faces compared to neutral faces.
  • No significant relations were found between temperamental shyness and P100 or N170 responses to happy faces relative to neutral faces, indicating specificity to threat cues.

Conclusions:

  • Temperamental shyness is linked to distinct patterns of neural activation during the early stages of processing threat-related facial emotions in children.
  • Findings suggest that shy children may exhibit specific neural responses to anger and fear cues, potentially reflecting heightened sensitivity or different processing strategies.
  • The specificity to threat-related faces highlights the importance of considering emotional valence when examining the influence of temperament on face processing.

Keywords:
EmotionEvent-related potentialsFace processingShynessTemperament

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