Blonde children exhibit more fear response? A new paper reports:
...Hair pigmentation was found to be significantly associated with behavioral inhibition in the sense that blond children exhibited higher fear scores. As in American samples, blue-eyed children had a higher fear score than did other children, but this difference was not statistically significant.
Jerome Kagan has reported these sort of findings before. Coloration is a funny trait, for example, there is now evidence that Europeans are highly constrained on one locus which affects complexion, while being high polymorphic on another (MC1R, on which East Asians seem to show strong recent positive selection). The finding that blue eyed or blonde youth tend to be more withdrawn or shy probably isn't that surprising, and it makes one wonder how such a bias might have shaped the higher order "characters" of cultures in the north of Europe. If I had to guess I ...
