Katie Hottovys CAPS #3

Proxemics

  When I think about nonverbal communication things like facial expressions and gestures are some of the first things that pop into my head.  Nonverbal communication also happens in people’s spatial relations.  When you study how humans use space in their lives this is called proxemics (Martin & Nakayama, 2009).  Within the study of proxemics there are three subcategories that breakdown spatial relations including feature space, semi-fixed space, and informal space (Martin & Nakayama, 2009).  To understand what the three categories mean lets take a office building as an example.  The office building has boundaries making itself the feature space,  the desks and cubicles in the building are semi fixed because they are barriers but can be moved and lastly the informal space is invisible and dynamic based on the individual.  The informal space is sometimes known as a “personal bubble” and changes based on relationships.   Each of these subcategories of spatial relations can either hinder or facilitate communication in an environment (Martin & Nakayama, 2009).

Personal bubbles are often exposed on public seating spaces. 

            Our book breaks down cultures into contact cultures and noncontact cultures.  Contact cultures being cultures that people stand closer together and use touch more often whereas noncontact cultures are purely the opposite (Martin & Nakayama, 2009).   When doing more research on this idea I stumbled upon an article from Discover Magazine that talks about “personal bubbles”.  The article explains how spatial relations may be defined by our ability to process emotions through our amygdalae “a pair of small almond-shaped structures” (Discover Magazine, 2009) found in the temporal lobes in the brain.  The article explains that by studying people who have a genetic disease that destroys the amygdale they have linked it with people not having a “personal bubble”.  By not being able to process emotions effectively a person has a hard time with spatial relations when talking to someone else.  That person for example, feels completely comfortably talking to someone when their faces almost touch whereas generally people prefer a 2-foot gap (Discover Magazine, 2009). 

            What I take away from learning about proxemics is more or less to just be understanding of people when they are talking to you.  If they are very close to you its most likely that that’s what they feel is most comfortable and perhaps the way they learned from their culture.  I’ve learned to not take it personal that they are “invading my space” but rather to understand where they are coming from.  I think proxemics is a fascinating idea to study and appears that it should not only be studied from the view point of what culture a person resides but also the genetic makeup of a person and their ability to process emotions.

           

Works Cited

Discover Magazine. (2009, August 30). Brain damage pops woman’s personal bubble. (K. P. Co., Producer) Retrieved February 14, 2012, from Discover Magazine: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/tag/personal-bubble/

Martin, J. N., & Nakayama, T. K. (2009). Intercultural Communication in Contexts (5th Edition ed.). New York, NY: McGraww-Hill.