Towards a definition of shyness

Introduction

“Shyness is a phenomenon so universally human that we can easily say: someone who has never been shy or someone who, under certain circumstances, does not run the risk of becoming so is an abnormal person.” That is the opening sentence in a book by Schouten (1935), one of the first Dutch psychologists to take an interest in the specific problems of shy people. He wrote that in his day, the 1930s, the problem was not seriously discussed in the literature. Nowadays the situation is quite different. We can find many publications under other, apparently more impressive key words, such as “social anxiety” and “sub-assertiveness”.

Yzermans (1982) has suggested that the increased interest in the phenomenon of shyness can be explained by certain developments in modern culture. These developments are supposed to have made Western people more demanding with respect to social contacts, with the result that people more frequently come to the conclusion that social skills are failing.

It is not possible to give a complete review of the literature. On systematically searching the literature under the key words “timidity”, “social anxiety”, and “(non)assertiveness”, we found about 1,600 publications! Confronted with such an enormous number of publications, we had to make a selection.