Abstract
The regulation of interpersonal distance and social space plays a central role in social behavior, and intrusions into personal space often lead to irritations in social interactions. Although there is plenty of research on people’s actual proxemics in social interactions, less is known about how individuals represent and reason about social space, and whether there are age-related differences. The current study examined preschool children’s and adults’ predictions about others’ interpersonal distances in two experiments. The findings show that preschool children have systematic expectations about others’ proxemics. In addition, we found age-related differences as adults assumed people to keep greater interpersonal distance than preschool children.
Highlights
In the Newtonian sense, space is a neutral parameter that is independent from the observer
Violations of these regularities and intrusions into personal space usually lead to irritations in social interactions (Burgoon et al, 2007; Kennedy et al, 2009; Knapp et al, 2013) and aversive reactions (Evans and Wener, 2007)
Data were non-normally distributed analysis of variance procedures are known to be robust to violations of normality (e.g., Schmider et al, 2010); analyses were conducted as planned
Summary
In the Newtonian sense, space is a neutral parameter that is independent from the observer. Interpersonal distance is regulated by a variety of factors, for example, the emotional state of the other person (Ruggiero et al, 2017; Cartaud et al, 2018), the other’s gender and age (Iachini et al, 2016), and the action abilities of the protagonist (Quesque et al, 2017) Violations of these regularities and intrusions into personal space usually lead to irritations in social interactions (Burgoon et al, 2007; Kennedy et al, 2009; Knapp et al, 2013) and aversive reactions (Evans and Wener, 2007). The current study was designed to shed light on this question
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