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Contrary to popular beliefs, a recent empirical study using eye tracking has shown that a non-clinical sample of socially anxious adults did not avoid the eyes during face scanning. Using eye-tracking measures, we sought to extend these findings by examining the relation between stable shyness and face scanning patterns in a non-clinical sample of 11-year-old children. We found that shyness was associated with longer dwell time to the eye region than the mouth, suggesting that some shy children were not avoiding the eyes. Shyness was also correlated with fewer first fixations to the nose, which is thought to reflect the typical global strategy of face processing. Present results replicate and extend recent work on social anxiety and face scanning in adults to shyness in children. These preliminary findings also provide support for the notion that some shy children may be hypersensitive to detecting social cues and intentions in others conveyed by the eyes. Theoretical and practical implications for understanding the social cognitive correlates and treatment of shyness are discussed.

The eyes convey important information for facial identification (Gold et al., 2004 and Heisz and Shore, 2008) and intention detection (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, & Jolliffe, 1997). Clinically impaired populations characterized by extreme social deficits are known to avoid the eyes during face scanning. For example, children with autism tend to dwell on the mouth rather than the eyes when processing faces (Klin, Jones, Schultz, Volkmar, & Cohen, 2002) and show impaired face recognition performance (Dawson et al., 2002). Evidence on the extent to which these findings generalize to non-clinical populations characterized by social deficits is relatively limited. Individuals who are socially anxious are characterized by social deficits (see Crozier & Alden, 2005, for a review). Non-clinical socially anxious individuals are known to make less eye contact with an interviewer than their non-socially anxious counterparts (Daly, 1978). People who are socially anxious look less at their audience than non-anxious individuals (Eves & Marks, 1991), and their looking-time is related to their level of anxiety (Jurich & Jurich, 1974). Still others have noted that increased social anxiety was related to decreased eye contact in social interactions (Farabee, Holcom, Ramsey, & Cole, 1993). However, a relation between level of anxiety and eye gaze behavior is not always observed (Hofman, Gerlach, Wender, & Roth, 1997). Taken together, these studies are potentially limited by the behavioral coding method of monitoring eye movements, which can only provide a crude measure of gaze position in contrast to the more reliable methods presently available. Using eye tracking, one study found that adults with social phobia avoided the eye region of the face more than normal controls (Horley, Williams, Gonsalvez, & Gordon, 2003). However, a more recent study, using eye tracking with a non-clinical adult sample reported that women high in social anxiety tended to fixate longer at the eye region than medium or low socially anxious women (Wieser, Pauli, Alpers, & Mulhberger, 2009). Even though direct gaze generated more anxiety (as measured by increased heart rate), fixations to the eye regions by high socially anxious women were observed regardless of whether the gaze direction of the stimuli was direct or averted. These results suggest that social anxiety may not be associated with gaze aversion—at least in a laboratory setting. The primary goal of the present study was to extend recent findings of Wieser et al. (2009) by examining the relation between temperamental shyness and face scanning behavior in a non-clinical sample of 11 year-old children. Shyness and social anxiety are known to be conceptually and empirically related and have often been used interchangeably in the extant literature even though they have, in part, different meanings (Rubin and Asendorpf, 1993 and Schmidt and Buss, 2009). Although social anxiety and shyness reflect the process of affective (e.g., nervousness), cognitive (e.g., fear of evaluation) and behavioral (e.g., awkward social responses) uneasiness in social situations, temperamental shyness is presumed to be an enduring trait-like characteristic of one's personality (Biedel and Turner, 1998 and Kagan, 1994). Shyness is known to be associated with avoidant behavior, especially during social interactions, and such behaviors are prevalent throughout development. As early as the second year of post-natal life, 10–15% of typically developing toddlers consistently turn away and hide from novel people, objects, and situations (Fox et al., 2001, Kagan, 1994 and Kagan, 1999). Of these toddlers, some will maintain their avoidant tendencies and develop into temperamentally shy children and adults (Biedel and Turner, 1998 and Schmidt and Schulkin, 1999). Interestingly, although the avoidance of eye contact is an observable behavior presumed to maintain non-clinical shyness (Cheek and Buss, 1981, Garcia et al., 1991 and Pilkonis, 1977), no studies have used eye tracking to reliably capture precise face scanning patterns in relation to shyness among non-clinical samples and apparently none with children. To do so, we used the Jane test of face identity ( Mondloch, Le Grand, & Maurer, 2002). Twelve new versions of a single Caucasian female face (‘Jane’) were created. Four differed in the shape of the eyes and mouth (feature set), four differed in the shape of the external contour (contour set), and four differed in the spacing among facial features (spacing set). During the task, participants made same/different judgments for pairs of faces from each of the three face sets. This task has been used previously to measure developmental changes in sensitivity to each of these cues to facial identity ( Mondloch et al., 2002), the effects of early deprivation on later face processing ( Le Grand et al., 2001 and Le Grand et al., 2003), face processing in individuals with Williams syndrome ( Karmiloff-Smith et al., 2004), and to compare the sensitivity of shy versus non-shy children to each of these cues to facial identity ( Brunet et al., in press). We elected to use the Jane task in the current study for two reasons. First, it allowed us to determine whether scanning patterns differed across the three face sets. Each face set isolates a different aspect of the face that can be used for identification: the shape of facial features (feature set), the shape of the face (contour set), and configural face information represented by the distance among features (spacing set). We anticipated greater fixation on the eye region during the feature block than during the spacing and contour blocks; attending to a single internal feature (eye or mouth) would result in high accuracy on the feature set, whereas high accuracy on the spacing requires integration across the internal features and high accuracy on the contour set would require attending to either a local external feature (e.g., chin shape) or global face shape. Second, in a previous study, we tested 40 typically developing 10-year-old children on this task and, based on their scores on maternal report of shyness using the Colorado Child Temperament Inventory (CCTI; Buss and Plomin, 1984 and Rowe and Plomin, 1977), we assigned them to one of three groups: low, medium, and high shy (Brunet et al., in press). The high-shy children made more errors than their non-shy peers on the spacing set, but not on either of the feature or contour sets. These results suggest that the relation between shyness and face processing may vary with the type of information that is critical for discrimination. In the present study, we re-tested a subset of our original sample (28 of the original 40 children) one year later. For each face set, we examined whether scanning patterns differed as a function of shyness. The present investigation appears to be the first study to explore the relation between shyness and face scanning using eye-tracking technology in a non-clinical sample of children, and thus it provides a test of two contrasting hypotheses. According to an avoidance hypothesis, a positive relation between shyness and eye avoidance during face scanning is expected. Shyness is characterized by avoidance behaviors ( Pilkonis, 1977), and one very salient avoidant behavior is not looking at the eyes and eye region because these areas convey possible social threat ( Farabee et al., 1993). Alternatively, shy individuals may exhibit hyper-vigilance looking to the eyes for important social cues, albeit brief, as a result of their heightened self-consciousness during social interactions (Crozier, 1979). Shy people are overly concerned that other people will evaluate them negatively during social interactions. Fatis (1983) found that shy individuals report greater negative cognitions during social interactions, including self-consciousness about their social skills during the interaction, worry about how the other person is evaluating them, and general unpleasantness of the situation. This latter hypothesis is in line with the recent report that socially anxious adults fixate longer at the eyes during face scanning (Wieser et al., 2009), leading to the hyper-vigilance hypothesis: a positive relation between shyness and dwell time to the eyes.