A recent line of research in the personal space area addresses the subject's experiential state of social spacing. One such study has reported that under close spacing, subjects experience the distance as significantly closer than the actual distance. This paper investigated the phenomenology of distant spacing. Females were moved beyond their preferred distance to another person and their judgments of the distant spacing were measured. Such a condition led to a significant overestimation of the actual personal space. The deductive base for this research was sensory-tonic theory, and the results were discussed within a cognitive-distance model of interpersonal spacing.
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