Misjudging personal space drives the need for distance in socially anxious people

People with higher social anxiety did not automatically walk more slowly toward others or keep more physical distance from them, according to a virtual-reality study published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. Instead, the link with personal space emerged particularly among people who believed they were closer to others than they really were.

Social anxiety is characterised by fear of social scrutiny and negative evaluation. Avoiding social situations is one obvious response, but researchers are also interested in much subtler behaviors: hesitating while approaching someone, avoiding eye contact, or maintaining a slightly greater physical gap. Such behaviors can matter because they may shape how other people respond during an interaction.

Previous experiments have often found that greater social anxiety is associated with keeping more distance. But personal space is not determined purely by the actual number of centimeters between two people. Someone who is physically a metre away but feels as though they are much closer may react differently from somebody who estimates the same distance accurately. Earlier work led researchers to propose that this kind of misjudgment could help explain why social anxiety and personal space are sometimes linked.

Led by Stefania Bucur at Radboud University in the Netherlands, the study placed participants in an immersive virtual-reality environment resembling a social gathering in a café. After three people were excluded because of faulty or missing data, 106 adults remained (average age 23.5 years, 70% female).

Participants completed a series of six trials in the virtual environment. Researchers recorded how fast they approached the groups of virtual people and how close they came without explicitly telling them that personal distance was the target measure. Later, participants were deliberately asked to choose a distance they considered comfortable. They also estimated how far away they had been, both numerically and visually, allowing the researchers to measure whether they tended to overestimate or underestimate distance.

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Contrary to the team’s initial expectations, higher social-anxiety scores were not directly associated with walking more slowly or maintaining a larger interpersonal distance, whether distance was measured automatically during the task or deliberately afterwards.

Distance perception, however, complicated that result. Participants who believed they were closer to the virtual group than they actually were tended, under certain measures, to leave more space. More importantly, numerical underestimation changed the relationship between anxiety and consciously preferred distance. Among people who underestimated how far away they were, higher social anxiety was associated with preferring more distance. No comparable social-anxiety effect appeared among participants who overestimated their distance.

The researchers summarized the pattern by writing that “individuals with high [social anxiety] do not keep greater interpersonal distance per se, but only do so when they tend to judge the distance to others as very close.”

Some limitations are to be noted. For instance, social scenarios in VR may not trigger the full range of complex social fears that occur in real life. Additionally, the fixed trial order and ambiguity in distance-estimation instructions may also have influenced responses. Participants were asked to estimate their distance from a table, but they may have used different reference points when making that judgement.

The study, “Social Anxiety and Preferred Interpersonal Distance: The Role of Estimation Bias,” was authored by Stefania Bucur, Deepshikha Prasad, and Wolf-Gero Lange.