PERRY ET AL. (PERSONAL SPACE)

Interpersonal Space, social salience, social cues, emapthy?

-Interpersonal distance (personal space): the relative distance between people. It is the area of space around a person in which they prefer not to have others enter. It is like a bubble that moves with the person. This bubble may be larger or smaller depending on the social situation the person is in

-Empathy: how people respond to the observed experiences of others, seeing or imagining experiences from the other person's point of view and feeling concerned or upset for them

-Social salience: the importance or attention someone gives to cues from other people, e.g. body language, interpersonal distance and expressions

-Social cues: these are facial expressions or body language which people use to send messages to one another, for example a smile to indicate happiness

Psychology Being Investigated

-When we stand farther away from someone than expected, this sends a signal that we feel uncomfortable and less responsive. On the other hand, if we leave too little personal space, then the other person may feel uncomfortable or even threatened

-Interpersonal distance is chosen based on relationship with others

-Different zones of space - Intimate, Personal, Social and Public

-Intimate zone - used between romantic partners or very close family members and involves all senses

-Personal zone - used with other people in most everyday interactions, in which we can see, touch and hear the other person

-Social zone - used in formal interactions with others, in which we may use louder voices, body movements and eye contact

-Public zone -used to keep distance from public figures (e.g. a person making a speech), in which a loud voice and body movements usually feature

Psychology Being Investigated (2)

-Several factors affecting Interpersonal distance - situation, culture, social hormone (oxytocin) which regulates social thinking and behaviour

-Individual differences in empathy abilities suggest that this trait can shape how people process social cues (social salience), meaning that empathy may also be linked to personal space preferences

-Effects of OT including placebo was tested by the researcher

-Placebos are given to participants in psychological experiments in order to provide a control condition, so the effects of the placebo can be directly compared to the effects of the treatment condition (in this case, OT)

Background

-Investigating how people's personal space preferences are affected by a few different factors

-Measured people's preferences for different social figures so they could compare how close people want to be to strangers or friends

-Tested whether people with different empathy abilities were influenced by OT in the same or different ways when asked about their personal space preferences

Aim

-Test the differential effect of the social hormone oxytocin (OT) on personal space preference in relation to a person's empathy ability

-Believed that controlling for empathetic traits in individual participants would reveal the effect of OT on interpersonal distance choices

-Wanted to find out whether highly empathetic individuals would prefer closer distances while low empathy individuals would prefer greater interpersonal distances when given OT

Research method & design

-Laboratory experiment at University of Haifa

-Mixed experimental design

-IV was operationalised as two levels: 'high empathy level' or 'low empathy level’ (IV is naturally occuring and was not manipulated)

-Repeated measures design as participants took part in both levels of second IV of ‘treatent’

-The IV of treatment was operationalised in the experiment as: OT administered or placebo administered. This IV was manipulated by the researchers

-In Experiment I only there was a third IV known as 'condition'. This was also a repeated measures design and included the levels stranger, authority, friend and ball

-The dependent variable (DV) was the personal space requirements of each participant. In Experiment 1, the DV was operationalised as the preferred distance measured between participant and approaching person/object. In Experiment 2 the DV was operationalised as preferred distance and angle between two chairs in a room

Sample

-54 male undergraduates from the University of Haifa, aged 19-32 years (mean age 25.29)

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