Simone Shane's blog

A few weeks ago I was doing a project on maternal separation anxiety for another course when I came upon a very interesting article that outlined a study conducted with premature infants in neonatal intensive care units (NICU) and their mothers. All mothers participated in kangaroo care, an intervention program for hospital bound infants where mothers and infants have skin-to-skin contact, whereas only half listened to soothing music concurrently. Those mother-infant dyads listening to music reaped great benefits: the mothers’ separation anxiety when leaving her child, as well as general trait anxiety, decreased while the infants had more quiet sleep and cried less (1). Music seemed to help sooth both the mother and child during a very anxious time.

The notion of “shyness” is something most of us know quite well. In fact, according to prevalence studies, somewhere around 40-50% of American adults have first-hand experience on what it’s like to be chronically shy (1). Although differing from the Big Five personality trait of introversion, in that shy people are in fact fearful of social interaction while introverts merely prefer solitary environments, chronic shyness is often categorized as a characteristic trait (2). The precursor for this shyness trait is frequently cited as the temperament of behavioral