Personal Space in Children

On the basis of an assumed relation between psychological closeness and physical proximity, it was hypothesized that, as the distance between members of depicted dyads increases, (a) the degree of acquaintance assigned to them by children would decrease, and (b) the degree of liking assigned would decrease. 2 tasks designed to test these hypotheses were administered to sixth-grade children. The first personal space task required Ss to assign acquaintance or liking designations to printed silhouettes of peer dyads. Data indicated strong inverse relations between interfigure distances and both degree of acquaintance and degree of liking. It was concluded that sixth graders assume a correlation between physical proximity and psychological closeness. The second personal space task required Ss to place distances between a self-referent figure and printed peer figures variously described. Data again showed the inverse relations. The sex differences also found were explained in terms of sex-appropriate behavior.