Personal Space and Density as Factors in Task Performance and Feeling of Crowding

Abstract

The study was an investigation of the effects of density and personal space on simple and complex task performance and on feelings of crowding on 60 female Hindu students in India. A 2 x 2 design was used. Density was manipulated by varying the number of subjects in a fixed room space (social density), and the stop-distance technique was used to measure personal space. Results revealed that complex task performance was adversely affected by a high-density condition and by the personal space of the subjects, leading to a significant interaction effect of the two variables, but no significant main or interaction effect was found for the simple task performance. The subjects with "far" personal space under the high-density condition evaluated the environment of the experimental room as most crowded, more than any other subject did.

Hypersociability in the behavioral phenotype of 17q21.31 microdeletion syndrome

“…Mean personal distance in both conditions was expressed in centimetres (ranging from 0 to 300). The personal space paradigm has been used in numerous settings including medicine [Nechamkin et al, 2003], neuroscience [Kennedy et al, 2009;Kennedy and Adolphs, 2011], and social psychology [Sinha and Sinha, 1991] but, despite all these studies, no unifying normative data for the PST are available as yet.…”

Investigating the immediate and long-term effects of job stressors on frontline service employees

“…By applying the cognitive appraisal model to crowding, we suggest that when faced with customer crowding, FSEs first appraise the extent of felt stress from the perceived crowding. As mentioned previously, crowding causes stress by requiring the FSE to interact with too many people (Sinha & Sinha, 1989). In turn, situations involving a higher customer count than usual among FSEs in the same work environment consistently lead to perceptions of crowding regardless of the FSEs' individual personality traits or characteristics.…”

“…Stress arousal has been linked with perceived crowding (Altman, 1975). Crowding causes stress through sensory overload and by the need to interact with too many people (Sinha & Sinha, 1989). Environmental psychology literature identifies crowding due to high human density as one of the most powerful workplace influencers of cognitions and behaviors (Evans & Lepore, 1992).…”

Planning crowd events to achieve high participant satisfaction

“…Investigation has also focused on the contribution of different crowd situations to individual experience of stress [4] and personal space preferences [7,8,26,23,13,6,5]. Moreover, studies have considered a range of different crowd types, including: sporting events [35,12]; retail environments [17,19,31]; religious pilgrimages [9,10]; restaurants [29,34,22]; and music festivals [11].…”