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Communications Personal Space

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Submitted By rrothste
Words 1185
Pages 5
Ryan Rothstein
Nonverbal Communications 308
Paper One: Personal Space Personal space plays a major role in our daily interactions with people, and can affect our conversations that we have with one another. For this assignment I chose to work with my roommate, Yale Mendelson, to test out the different lengths of distance between each other to carry out a conversation. The three different distances that I chose was down the hall from each other (approximately 8 feet), face to face (approximately 1.5 feet), and face to face with less than a half of foot between our faces. All three of these distances brought about different reactions between the two of us and showed differences in conversation at each distance. The first distance was the furthest, we began our conversation, I had to speak very loudly, almost a yell, to begin our interaction. I could tell right away that Yale was uncomfortable with this because he is not very outgoing and we were bringing some attention to ourselves. The hall way was not empty so as we were talking back and forth to each other I noticed that we both had to use hand gestures and certain body language cues to help the other realize what they were saying. This setting was definitely difficult for us to have a normal, personal conversation. This distance left for a very broad interaction that was not able to ever become very personal. The next distance that we used to interact with each other was the face to face at about 1 to 2 feet apart. For this distance, I could tell right away that both of us were much more comfortable. Our interaction went on for much longer then the last one and we were talking about things that we would not be able to discuss in a distance such as the first. I can say that both of us felt “normal” and comfortable being in this situation. This distance seemed to be the most common distance that you

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