Does Pathological Shyness Make for School Shooters?
SATURDAY, Aug. 18 (HealthDay News) — What motivates some teens to gun down fellow students in the hallways or grounds of their schools? Perhaps a characteristic called “cynical shyness.” This is an extreme form of shyness affecting mostly males that can lead to violent behavior such as that seen at Columbine, Colo., or, most recently, Virginia Tech, according to researchers who were to present their findings Saturday evening at the American Psychological Association’s annual meeting, in San Francisco. “Cynically shy people are shy people who are motivated toward moving to others, and then they are rejected,” said Bernardo Carducci, lead author of the study and director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany. “In addition to feelings of anxiety about social situations, cynically shy people, who are a small subclass of shy people, also have feelings of anger and hostility toward others and that comes from this sense of disconnect,” Carducci expla
