Abstract
The current study explored the relationship between shyness and face scanning patterns for own- and other-race faces in adults. Participants completed a shyness inventory and a face recognition task in which their eye movements were recorded by a Tobii 1750 eye tracker. We found that: (1) Participants’ shyness scores were negatively correlated with the fixation proportion on the eyes, regardless of the race of face they viewed. The shyer the participants were, the less time they spent fixating on the eye region; (2) High shyness participants tended to fixate significantly more than low shyness participants on the regions just below the eyes as if to avoid direct eye contact; (3) When participants were recognizing own-race faces, their shyness scores were positively correlated with the normalized criterion. The shyer they were, the more apt they were to judge the faces as novel, regardless of whether they were target or foil faces. The present results support an avoidance hypothesis of shyness, suggesting that shy individuals tend to avoid directly fixating on others’ eyes, regardless of face race.
Highlights
It is possible to infer an individual’s emotional state, age, sex, race, and other identity-relevant information by looking at his or her face [1]
The shyer the participants were, the less time they spent fixating on the eye region
Past studies have suggested that the information used to accurately identify faces is largely contained in the eye region [24]
Summary
It is possible to infer an individual’s emotional state, age, sex, race, and other identity-relevant information by looking at his or her face [1]. Relatively few studies have examined individual differences in face processing [7] and the way in which individuals’ personality characteristics influence identity recognition and facial scanning patterns. Personality traits may affect facial scanning patterns because such characteristics shape aspects of social cognition as basic as eye contact [8]. Both shyness and social anxiety, terms that have been used interchangeably in previous literature despite having slightly different meanings [9,10], are characterized by a preoccupation of the self when engaging in or anticipating a real or imagined social situation [11]. One highly salient feature of shyness and social anxiety is gaze aversion and the avoidance of face-toface interaction [12]
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