smiling behavior have also been observed to be used in the effort to regulate body space. In this regard, Schultz and Barefort (1974) measured eye contact and the amount of smiling used by 36 male undergraduates in an experiment in which both interpersonal distance and topic intimacy were manipulated.
Schultz and Barefort (1974) reported that looking and listening simultaneously increased as personal space increased. In other words, the greater the violation of students' personal space, the less they were inclined to simultaneously look and listen to the other. It was also found that the amount of smiling increased as the distance between interactants decreased. However, it was noted that this finding was in conflict with other studies examining smiling and personal space with these studies tending to show that people smiled less as a ways of regulating violations of their space.
For example, Coutts and Ledden (1977) investigated the hypothesis that for any pair of interactants, a change in one of the nonverbal components of intimacy on the part of one person elicits in the other a compensatory shift in one or more of the components. Methods included an initial interview session, after which 40 female undergraduates were confronted with a female interviewer who either increased, decreased, or maintained the same face-to-face seating distance as she did in the initial session.
Findings revealed that when the female interviewer moved closer, subjects looked at her less and smiled less. Conversely, when the female interviewer moved farther away, subjects looked at her more, smiled more, leaned forward, and oriented themselves more directly.
Another finding of the study was that the greater the invasion of the person's personal space, the more inclined people were to use hand gestures in their communications. These gestures were said to be clear indicators of anxiety and interpersonal discomfort.
In another i...