Shyness among Children With and Without Learning Disability-A Comparative Study

Shyness has generally been investigated as a negative and unpleasant emotional state, strongly related to social anxiety and loneliness. An Individual is likely to develop shyness if he or she grew up in an insulting home or was bullied or abandoned by their peers during their early childhood (Hilliard, 2005).Some studies findings reported that shyness was associated with social and school problems. In contrast to this few reported shyness positively correlates in high academic achiever than low achiever. Keeping this as background an attempt made to assess level of shyness when children reportedly having learning disability (LD). Also we aimed to know whether gender and age got anything to do with shyness among children with and without LD. For the present study a total of 320 children (LD=160, Without LD=160) with age range of 9-16 yrs in both genders recruited. The Children Shyness Assessment Test [CSAT] (D’Souza, 2006)was used to assess shyness in the selected samples. Two-way ANOVA was employed to find out the influence of group and age, group and gender on shyness.  Results revealed children with LD significantly exhibited higher shyness than non LD subjects, Male subjects in physiological domain had higher shyness and subjects in the higher age groups expressed higher shyness.