Perry et al

• Interpersonal distance (personal space)


  A portable, invisible boundary surrounding us, into which others may not trespass. It regulates how closely we interact with others, moves with us, and expands and contracts according to situation in which we find ourselves.
• Interpersonal distance (personal space)


  • Can be affected by culture, social experiences, personality traits, and individual differences
  • Aspects such as social anxiety or being forced to be further away than usual (seen during the Covid-19 pandemic with social (physical] distancing) affect our interpersonal distance (personal space) experiences too and this can affect friendships and intimate relationships that people have.
• Amygdala


  Appears to play a role in interpersonal distance (personal space) in humans
• Oxytocin


  A type of social hormone that plays a large role in social behaviour and social cognition in humans. It promotes pro-social behaviour and approach behaviours.
• Oxytocin administration


  Increased preferred interpersonal distance (personal space) between a participant and an attractive woman, but only seen in male, monogamous participants when a female experimenter was present and not a male experimenter. Oxytocin had no effect on male participants who were single.

  
• Social salience hypothesis


  If oxytocin increases attention to social cues, it should have widely varying effects on downstream cognition and behaviour, depending on interpersonal context (such as in presence of an attractive woman for men in a relationship), as well as on how an individual perceives social situations and tends to react in different interpersonal settings. For example, one person may find a social setting comforting and enjoyable, whereas another may find it intimidating or threatening.

  
• Empathy


  The ability to share someone else's emotional state by imagining what it would be like to be in that situation. You may never have directly experienced the situation for yourself, but you are able to understand what the feelings could be like. It refers to us being able to understand the feelings of others.