Human relationships are vital for well-being, however shy individuals report lower relational quality than the non-shy. In an effort to explore how shyness affects people’s interpersonal relationships, this study focused on communication competence (as perceived by self and other) as the process by which shyness influences relational quality. Undergraduate students recruited a same-sex platonic...

Blushing has adaptive social functions. However, blushing is also assumed to be a hallmark of social anxiety and shyness. For the first time, blushing and its relation to the expressions of shyness and social anxiety was examined in early childhood. Four-and-a-half-year-old children (N = 102) were asked to perform (singing in front of an audience) and watched back their performance in the prese...

The existence of consistent individual differences in behaviour ('animal personality') has been well documented in recent years. However, how such individual variation in behaviour is maintained over evolutionary time is an ongoing conundrum. A well-studied axis of animal personality is individual variation along a bold-shy continuum, where individuals differ consistently in their propensity to...

Animal social networks can be extremely complex and are characterized by highly non-random interactions between group members. However, very little is known about the underlying factors affecting interaction preferences, and hence network structure. One possibility is that behavioural differences between individuals, such as how bold or shy they are, can affect the frequency and distribution of...

Shyness and sociability are two fundamental personality dimensions that are conceptually and empirically orthogonal and are conserved across cultures, development, and phylogeny. However, we know relatively little regarding how shyness and sociability are represented and maintained in the brain. Here we examined neural responses to the processing of different types of social threat using event-...

Two random processes X and Y on a metric space are said to be ε-shy coupled if there is positive probability of them staying at least a positive distance ε apart from each other forever. Interest in the literature centres on nonexistence results subject to topological and geometric conditions; motivation arises from the desire to gain a better understanding of probabilistic coupling. Previous n...

During collective movement, bolder individuals often emerge as leaders. Here, we investigate whether this reflects a greater propensity of bold individuals to initiate movement, or a preference for shy individuals to follow a bolder leader. We set up trios of stickleback fish comprising a focal individual who was either bold or shy, and one other individual of each personality. We then recorded...

1 Our aim Many intelligent robots have already been developed for entertaining people or providing useful information. Such robots need capability of human-robot interaction to be a communication partner of the human. Our aim is to achieve human-robot interaction which is as natural as human-human interaction. 2 Why do people feel shy about interaction with robot? When we exhibited our robots R...