Too close for comfort: behavioural and neural investigations of interpersonal distance

Veranic, Kristina (2024) Too close for comfort: behavioural and neural investigations of interpersonal distance. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Interpersonal distance is a ubiquitous factor of everyday human interactions. As such it communicates a wealth of information, such as our intentions, personal preferences, and relation to the other person. The space between us and another person affects how socially and behaviourally relevant they are to us and the quality and quantity of sensory information available. This thesis explores interpersonal distance across 9 experiments. Experiments reported in Chapter 2 investigated how physical distance (Experiment 2) and distance proxies (Experiments 3 and 4) between a person and a life-sized whole-person image impacted the ratings of various trait impressions and how isolated faces and bodies were rated at different distances (Experiment 5). These experiments revealed amplification of judgements with proximity and showed important differences of distance modulation of different traits. Chapter 3 explores the role of context on trait ratings and how different contexts interact with distance. We found that both social (Experiment 6) and non-social (Experiment 7) contexts affected all rated traits and a selective interaction between social context and distance on trustworthiness ratings, where context had a bigger effect at further distances. Chapter 4 investigates the individual differences in explicit estimations of distance preferences and is used to validate the experimental projector design used in Chapters 2 and 3, by revealing people kept similar comfort distances towards strangers and their life-sized projected images. Subtle distance modulations of person perception informed Experiment 9 (Chapter 5), where we used a confederate to understand whether real interpersonal distance would have a systematic effect on the neural correlates of attention and arousal. We found greater alpha band suppression in conditions with greater behavioural relevance – near more than far and approaching more than receding. Together, these findings contribute to our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of proximity and its effects on social interactions.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Depositing User:	Nicola Veasy
Date Deposited:	29 Oct 2024 13:23
Last Modified:	29 Oct 2024 13:23
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/97329
DOI:

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