Tag Archive for Proximity

Spatial Empathy

by  • March 5, 2013 • 0 Comments

This 'fugitive,' trying to escape a space invader.

This ‘fugitive’ is trying to escape a space invader.

“Spatial empathy” is an informal term used by expatriate workers in Hong Kong and then later in Japan and China who were typically from Australia, England, France and the United States. The term was use to describe the awareness that individuals have about how their proximity affects the comfort of the people around them. Even though cities such as Hong Kong, Japan and China were westernized, the walkways and public transport system were very crowded by comparison. The expatriates found that preventing intrusion into their personal space was difficult and at times impossible.

The foreign workers that were not accustomed to physical closeness and physical contact were made to feel violated by the locals. They felt that their privacy was being infringed upon and that their personal space requirements weren’t being met. What the workers failed to realize was that it was their responsibility to adapt to the cultural norms of the locals and not the other way around so while the locals had no spatial empathy the workers had no cultural empathy.

While spatial empathy was first coined to describe the differences between cultures it also has application within cultures as some people have different levels of tolerance with regards to their personal space. Naturally, it is your choice to decide what you will do with someone else’s preference, be it to respect it by reading their signals and give them space, or ignore it and invade it. I supposed it would have everything to do with what your goals happens to be. Will you respect the needs of the people around you and try to make them feel comfortable or will you invade their space to fulfill your own needs?

Space And Eye Contact

by  • March 5, 2013 • 0 Comments

Eye contact avoidance tells others that we aren't interested in what's being sold.

Eye contact avoidance tells others that we aren’t interested in what’s being sold.

You can imagine that strangers walking about in public want to maintain a certain degree of separation between one another. This can and is achieved through eye contact. Reducing or preventing eye contact is a way to tell other people that they wish to maintain their space and privacy, and do not wish to communicate with others. Eye contact is a function of intimacy and has been referred to as part of the equilibrium state. That is, eye contact is one component that controls the degree of intimacy, the other is distance. By controlling one or the other, or both, we can control aspects of our equilibrium state, or intimacy, such as whether it will start at all, and how or when it should end. You can imagine that full intimacy can not happen at great distances although telephones and web technology attempt to do otherwise. Each fails miserably and does intimacy no justice.

As distance increases, intimacy decreases so you can imagine that strangers would feel freer to glare at others from say, across the road, but as they near the point at which they intersect they will drop or avert their eyes so as to eliminate intimacy. Therefore, that which gives permission for staring is distance and that which protects intimacy is eye contact. To have real intimacy both proximity and eye contact must be present. By this argument, city people aren’t rude at all, they are just doing what is normal, avoiding unwanted intimacy from strangers. Rural settings where there is a real possibility that you actually know the person on the street, or know a relative of the person is large, so intimacy is not only permitted by also safe. Eye contact in the city can send the wrong message to the wrong person inviting unwanted contact.

To illustrate this point imagine a women who is happily married but otherwise attractive to men. Upon entering a coffee shop, she turns the heads of men. When she notices that she is being watched, she averts her gaze and instead of making eye contact she ‘looks over the heads of others’ or possibly even looking down her nose at them by tilting her head backward showing disapproval. She sends a disinterested message, an “I’m taken.” If startled, she might inadvertently make eye contact with a stranger but she will instinctively drop her head and avert her gaze sideways, being careful to make no emotion facial expressions. In doing so, she avoids emitting the wrong message and therefore prevents unwanted solicitation. Men are often victims of assuming any eye contact is flirtatious, even if it happens by accident, thus women are generally careful of whom they look at directly. Some women learn this through a bad experience; others seem to know it instinctively. Men can test this out for themselves by trying to secure eye contact with women as they pass them on the street. Men are rarely able to secure eye contact from strangers and it’s usually not for a lack of trying.

Status, Context And Personal Space

by  • March 5, 2013 • 0 Comments

Status and context affect spatial and proximity rules. For example, bosses are in charge of determining what level of closeness is appropriate and permitted as it relates to subordinate employees. This isn’t to say that employees enjoy this arrangement but rather that employees are not permitted to reverse proximity rules onto employers. Subordinate employees have many roles and one of them is tolerance of the rules set for them by their seniors. For example, a boss might pat the back of one his employees or put his or her arm around the new associate as a form of bonding. Reversal of the situation would be seen as an infringement on the status of the boss. When it comes to touching, a subordinate should never encroach on the personal space of someone holding a dominant position.

Contextual rules also exist with respect to personal space. In the office, it would be un-acceptable for sexual partners to touch one another or carry on in front of others. However, in the same office hosting a year-end business party with all of the same employees and their spouse’s, touching and even kissing would be common place.
Therefore, status and context are two other factors we should be conscious of as they relate to proximity and space.

Age, Age Gaps, Status And Its Affect On Body Language

by  • March 5, 2013 • 0 Comments

Since we’ve isolated women as the best readers of body language, it’s time to weed out the rest of the bad apples from the bunch. In fact, many other factors, aside from our sexes, play into our ability to read and use body language.

The first such factor is our age. Children first learn to communicate through nonverbal channels by using posture, gestures and proximity to influence the behaviour of the adults around them. If this doesn’t work they will resort to crying but for the most part this is non-directional and unsophisticated. In children, it is their body language which helps us to figure out their true desires. Before they can signal nonverbally, we are simply left guessing so thankfully children have relatively simple and predictable needs. Once they figure out the use of words, their nonverbal gestures quickly diminish and eventually get mostly left by the wayside. Children who first begin to speak will show more interest in speaking then other channels even if it means they need to interact more with their adult counterparts versus other children of the same age. At the age of three, most children have lost or dropped almost all of their nonverbal communication and are fully into verbal speech.

Age also plays another more important role in reading body language. Those people that are closest to our age are the easiest to read. Our ability to accurately read others is much lower with people who are much younger and much older then ourselves and easiest amongst our own peer group. We spend the most amount of time with our peer group so familiarity could be a factor, however, more importantly is our ability to relate and empathize. So the take-away message is that our ability to empathize with the needs, desires and emotions of others is a key part in reading body language. Empathy is the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others and to feel what they feel.

The greater the gap in age between the reader and the target, the greater is the discrepancy in accuracy. If you’ve ever watch siblings of similar age, you know that they have an uncanny ability to interpret and understand each other. It’s particularly interesting to watch small children decipher each others seemingly nonsensical gibberish and random movements. Naturally it follows that teenagers and seniors are difficult to read by the middle aged and children are poor readers of all adults (or at least do a good job pretend to be).

Older faces are difficult to read naturally, even for other seniors. Older faces have
weaker muscle tone, and so produce less exaggerated expressions. What expressions are made are then covered by wrinkles disguising them even more. Status and occupational differences that we see everyday at work, also make it difficult for us to read others. Upper management dealing with lower management in a company or teachers dealing with students must deal with cohort differences daily and it can become stressful.

Higher status people might lack the interest to associate with lower status people and low status people might sense this and so return less eye contact feeling not cared about. This lack of empathy spirals into each party caring less and less about each other. Lower status employees may also feel envious of higher status employees and share less information with them make it difficult to develop empathy. Health care workers that spend a lot of time with seniors can develop skills and read them more accurately, but only if they empathize with them. To be a good body language reader, you have to be able to put yourself in someone else’s position, and see the world as they do.