A new neuroimaging study provides strong evidence that unusual shyness in children may result from higher activity in the amygda

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问题     A new neuroimaging study provides strong evidence that unusual shyness in children may result from higher activity in the amygdala, a brain structure involved in vigilance and fear. Using magnetic resonance imaging(MRI)to examine adults who had been unusually shy in childhood, researchers showed pictures of unfamiliar faces, and those who were once shy displayed much higher activity in the amygdala than people who had been unusually outgoing as children.
    It has long been hypothesized that extreme shyness, which emerges in infancy and often persists into adulthood, must have some distinctive signature in the developing brain. However, this idea has not been tested directly because it is difficult to conduct brain imaging experiments with very young children. So Carl Schwartz did the next best thing—they studied 20-year-olds who were known to have been shy or outgoing as children. Schwartz says the study’s design has in fact allowed him to support "an even more wild hypothesis" that the brain differences underlying shyness in infancy can be seen with MRI two decades later.
    Some infants boldly approach new people, objects or situations, while others are timid when faced with anything unfamiliar. Children who are timid are said by psychologists to have "inhibited" temperaments and they are more prone to anxiety disorders; some even develop generalized social phobia, in which social encounters are so terrifying that they are avoided altogether. But Schwartz points out that only two of the nine subjects in the study who had been inhibited as children developed social phobia. He cautions that temperaments, in themselves, are not pathologies but basic "flavors" of human beings.
The neuroimaging studies show that shyness is______.

选项 A、a kind of disability due to differences on the brain
B、something that only emerges in a child in infancy
C、something that stays with the person for all his or her life
D、not a learned behaviour—it is innate

答案D

解析 属信息推断题。文章开头指出:“一项新的神经成像研究提供了有力证据,证明孩子过于害羞可能是由于扁桃核,即与警觉和恐惧有关的大脑结构较为活跃所致。”这说明害羞是天生的。
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