SHYNESS EVOLN

Higher primates are social creatures, hard-wired to want to meet and mate; but there might also be some value in their being cautious and risk-avoiding, traits that might over-evolve into excessive timidity. Neither Kagan nor Suomi suggest that shyness is fixed at birth. They see it as a case study in the rich interplay between nature and nurture. Similarly, for Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, shyness is a ‘secondary emotion’. Unlike primary emotions such as anger, fear and disgust — where there is a large biological and universally felt component — shyness is ‘tuned by experience’, leaving it open to a huge amount of cultural conditioning, historical variation and definitional ambiguity.