Personal space increases during the COVID-19 pandemic in response to real and virtual humans
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Abstract
Personal space is the distance that people tend to maintain from others during daily life in a largely unconscious manner. For humans, personal space-related behaviors represent one form of non-verbal social communication, similar to facial expressions and eye contact. Given that the changes in social behavior and experiences that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, including “social distancing” and widespread social isolation, may have altered personal space preferences, we investigated this possibility in two independent samples. First, we compared the size of personal space measured before the onset of the pandemic to its size during the pandemic in separate groups of subjects. Personal space size was significantly larger in those assessed during (compared to those assessed before) the onset of the pandemic (all d > 0.613, all p < 0.007). In an additional cohort, we measured personal space size, and discomfort in response to intrusions into personal space, longitudinally before and during the pandemic, using both conventional and virtual reality-based techniques. Within these subjects, we found that measurements of personal space size with respect to real versus virtual humans were significantly correlated with one another ( r = 0.625–0.958) and similar in magnitude. Moreover, the size of personal space, as well as levels of discomfort during personal space intrusions, increased significantly during (compared to before) the COVID-19 pandemic in response to both real and virtual humans (all d > 0.842, all p < 0.01). Lastly, we found that the practice of social distancing and perceived (but not actual) risk of being infected with COVID-19 were linked to this personal space enlargement during the pandemic (all p < 0.038). Taken together, these findings suggest that personal space boundaries expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic independent of actual infection risk level. As the day-to-day effects of the pandemic subside, personal space preferences may provide one index of recovery from the psychological effects of this crisis.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.09.21258234: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics Consent: Written informed consent was obtained from all subjects prior to enrollment, in accordance with the guidelines of the Partners Healthcare Institutional Review Board which approved this study.
IRB: Written informed consent was obtained from all subjects prior to enrollment, in accordance with the guidelines of the Partners Healthcare Institutional Review Board which approved this study.Sex as a biological variable These measurements were first collected before the COVID-19 pandemic (September 2019 -early March 2020) in 19 subjects (47 % female, mean age = 30.6 ± 11.3 years). Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.09.21258234: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics Consent: Written informed consent was obtained from all subjects prior to enrollment, in accordance with the guidelines of the Partners Healthcare Institutional Review Board which approved this study.
IRB: Written informed consent was obtained from all subjects prior to enrollment, in accordance with the guidelines of the Partners Healthcare Institutional Review Board which approved this study.Sex as a biological variable These measurements were first collected before the COVID-19 pandemic (September 2019 -early March 2020) in 19 subjects (47 % female, mean age = 30.6 ± 11.3 years). Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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