Behavioral Inhibition Among People of Pallor

This week I read the 2000 book Survival of the Prettiest by Nancy Etcoff. Basically, it makes the case for the evolutionary reasons behind human attention to physical beauty and directly takes on the popular idea that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." It was pretty solid, and I thought she did a particularly good job of distinguishing beauty from fashion and social status symbols (e.g. current American preference for thinness). Of course, evolutionary explanations run the risk of tautology, but references are given for the reader to judge for themselves how well the scientific reasoning stands up, and she seems careful about noting cultural influences.

She surveys a lot of research that many of us are familiar with (e.g. babies look longer at faces adults have judged to be attractive; the desired waist-to-hip ratio for women is 0.7, regardless of their overall size; symmetry ~ health ~ attractiveness) but also some things that I had not heard before.

Here's one research tidbit that was new and of interest to me for the obvious reasons:

"When people are asked to rate various personality traits of people they only see in pictures, they tend to judge blondes as weaker, more submissive, and less wise. Is this a result of media stereotyping of the typical blonde heroine? In an intriguing set of studies done on tempermental differences in infants and young children, psychologist Jerome Kagan has found that children with pale pigment, in particular children with blue eyes, are far more likely to be shy and inhibited than dark-eyed children. They are the most likely to be fearful of new situations, hesitant in approaching someone, quiet with a new person, and the most likely to stay close to their mothers. Brown-eyed children are bolder. Kagan speculates that fear of novelty, melanin production, and corticosteroid levels share some of the same genes.

His theory is speculative, suggesting that when people migrated to northern Europe they were faced with the problem of keeping up a body temperature that was used to a warmer climate. A mutation that increased the efficiency of the sympathetic nervous system and upped the level of norepinephrine (one of the major neurotransmitters) would have also raised their body temperature and offered a survival advantage. Unfortunately, it would also have left them with a more reactive nervous system and a more timorous temperment. Where does the pigment come in? High levels of norepinephrine can inhibit the production of melanin in the iris and can increase the level of circulating glucosteroids that can inhibit melanin production as well. So blonde hair and blue eyes and shyness may be a common biological package...."

She doesn't mention this but in addition, this researcher (Kagan) found that behavioral inhibition was more common among girls than boys.

Also, in the journal article I read, the researcher limits the sample to children of northern European descent, so it is not a cross-cultural analysis. (This also reduces the likelihood that behavioral differences between dark- and light-eyed children should be attributed to cultural differences between, e.g., Hispanic and Anglo families.)

They study behavioral inhibition among children because "with repeated exposure to such [unfamiliar] events, most people acquire socially acceptable strategies that enable them to disguise the disorganization that may attend novel experiences. Therefore, individual differences among adults in overt reactions to unfamiliarity are often subtle."

Sadly, my current level of coping with novel experiences (particularly unfamiliar people or places) is not that great, but it is still worlds better than when I was the age of the children in this study. I am not sure that at the age of the subjects (2 years) I would have been willing and able to even go through the experiments. (I found the description of the "stranger entry" segment particularly bad; there is no way I would have "spontaneously" approached some unfamiliar adult no matter how cool the toy was.) Does it mean something that 24% of parents of blue-eyed children declined to participate compared to 12% of brown-eyed? I would expect parents of scaredy kids would be more likely to refuse to participate. If anything, this suggests to me that the research under-estimates the behavioral inhibition of blue-eyed kids.

The idea that I may have an overly sensitive sympathetic nervous system is not surprising, given that it regulates the fight-or-flight response. My whole being goes into Danger! Danger! mode at the drop of a hat. (I mean that literally. The sound or sight in my (excellent) peripheral vision of something as mundane and non-threatening as a hat falling on the ground would make my heart pound.) And of course, I have a nervous system disorder of some kind ("nervous system disorder not otherwise specified" so it's not just I, it's the entirety of medical science who isn't quite sure what's wrong) so the plausibility of my sympathetic nervous system being fucked up seems high to me.