The effects of screen size and audience size on impressions of personal space when watching television.

Authors: Fielding, Sarah; Hindley, Michael; Reid, Gavin; Whitehead, Helen.

Abstract

Introduction

An important factor in social interaction is body language, and specifically the concept of personal space; as a sociable species this is a matter of everyday concern. Personal space can be described as 'an area with invisible boundaries surrounding a p erson's body into which intruders may not come' (Sommer, 1969). Many studies have shown that invasion of this space causes discomfort ( For example Argyle and Dean, 1965; Efran and Cheyne, 1974).

A more recent development in the study of personal space concerns whether or not this response of discomfort can be elicited by mediated stimuli such as television, as well as by real life experience. That is, when watching television can we respond directly to the events and objects presented without taking their portrayal into account? It has been suggested (Lombard 1995) that our perception has not yet evolved to deal with television, and that although we know that it is harmless we have not yet learnt to overlook the possible danger imposed by the stimuli.

Lombard, Reich, Grabe, Campanella and Ditton (1995) have provided some evidence for a direct response to experiences on film. On viewing a presentation recorded, for example, at the front of a roller coaster, subjects became physiologically aroused a nd reported feelings of movement and participation. Kraft (1987) showed subjects a series of slides and found that people who were photographed from below were interpreted as more strong and aggressive than those photographed from above. His interpretatio n of these results was that from the subject's viewpoint changing the camera angle had an effect on the real life consequences of the picture.

In 1995 Lombard presented subjects with television footage of several people reading news items and measured their feelings about the news readers and the environment in a questionnaire afterwards. He found that subjects' responses to the questionnai re were effected by manipulating the size of the screen on which the video was presented. A person who appears on a large television screen is more likely to invoke a violation of the viewer's sense of personal space. When this violation is coming from a rewarding person (high status, competent, attractive and credible as were used in Lombard's study) it is more likely to be provoke positive emotional responses.1 Hence a larger screen would relate to more positive responses.

This study is a manipulation of the 1995 experiment by Lombard with the added measure of audience size. That is, we explore whether or not manipulating a subject's feelings of personal space by altering the number of people in the room has an effect on the subjects' emotional responses to the presentation. James found in 1951 that the group size in which humans spend 71% of their time is two. Hence having two or three subjects (plus experimenters) in the room would feel more natural than having 15 pe ople in the room, which would be intrusive.

It is hypothesised that a large television screen will elicit significantly more positive emotional responses than a small screen. It is further hypothesised that audience size will have a significant effect on subjects' responses measured in the que stionnaire.

METHOD

Subjects

Availability sampling was used to acquire 72 volunteers. All participants were students at the University of St Andrews and were hence young people, predominantly between the ages of 17 to 25 and of mid to above average intelligence. A small majority were female.

38 subjects were in the big television condition: 23 in small groups and 15 in one large group. 34 subjects were used in the small television condition: 21 in small groups and 13 in a one large group.

Stimulus Preparation

The video which was used was recorded for this study by the experimenters. A series of three news items were chosen for their properties of being interesting but not controversial, so as not to induce excessively strong reactions in the subjects. The news reader was a twenty year old, relatively attractive male who was chosen by the experimenters as someone who was not likely to be known to the subjects. The video presentation was recorded with the news reader addressing the camera directly with no movements or background noises.

Apparatus

The large television screen used was 23 inches when measured diagonally, the small screen was 10 inches. A standard video recorder was also used, along with the one and a half minute video footage described above.

Materials

The questionnaire that was used was almost identical2 to the one used by Lombard in 1995. This included 25 semantically different bipolar items, separated into three sections. On each item the subject marked their response on a scale of one to ni ne, where one represented the most positive and nine the most negative response.

The first section, intended to measure subjects' emotional reactions to the news reader, asked 'How does the person in the video make you feel?' This was followed by five items such as Safe/Threatened and Sociable/Unsociable.

The second section, intended to measure subjects' impressions of the news reader, asked 'How does this person seem?' This was followed by nine items such as Warm/Cold and Strong/Weak.

The third section, intended to gauge subjects feelings about the viewing environment, asked 'How would you describe the environment in which you watched this?' This was followed by eleven items such as open/enclosed and public/private.

The questionnaire also included the subjects' gender and the question 'Do you know the speaker in the video in any way?' [For a full questionnaire see Appendix 1]

Design

This was a between subjects study where there were two independent variables: size of television screen (10 or 23 inches diagonally) and group size (5 or 15 people in the room). The dependent variable was responses to the questionnaire.

Procedure

The subjects were met by the experimenters in the foyer and, when all had arrived, were shown into the laboratory together. The blinds were closed to minimise distractions. Subjects were allowed to sit where they chose. They were asked to pay att ention and remain silent for the duration of the video, and informed that there would be a brief questionnaire to fill in once it was over. They completed the questionnaire alone and with no time constraint, and on finishing were debriefed.

Results

The data gathered in this experiment was subjects' ratings from one to nine on 25 items on the questionnaire. The lower the figure, the more positive the response. Although 72 subjects were initially tested, 28 were discarded as their results were biase d by their prior knowledge of the news reader.

There are no notable trends in the means between the four conditions.

Table 2 shows that according to the ANOVA neither of the independent variables had a significant effect on subject's responses to any of the three sections of the questionnaire.

DISCUSSION

The data gathered in this experiment does not provide enough evidence to except the alternative hypotheses that, firstly, the large television screen would produce significantly more positive emotional responses, and secondly that audience size would ha ve a significant effect. Neither the variable found to be significant by Lombard (1995), screen size, nor our added manipulation, audience size, produced a significant effect, and the reasons for this are discussed here.

In this experiment we used a news reader who was of a lower reward status than those that Lombard used. According to Lombard's reading of Burgoon's work, when a rewarding person violates expectancies by staying too far away or coming too close they a re judged more positively. Perhaps for some subjects (the younger ones or the ones who found the news reader more attractive) this effect occurred; but for the other half of the opposite held true. That is, the target was not interpreted as high status an d thus when an invasion of personal space was felt it induced negative evaluations of the invader and the environment (Fisher and Byrne, 1975; Smith and Knowles, 1978). Hence these two effects may have been acting against one another and causing an overal l non-significance of results.

Our failure to replicate the findings of Lombard regarding the effect of television screen size is likely to be due not to a flaw in the theory but to an experimental error. Subjects are often exposed to stimuli on giant screens in the cinema which a re considerably larger than our large screen condition, and thus the presentations on a 23 inch screen will not have been nearly as imposing as necessary, and not significantly larger than the small screen.

The failure of audience size to produce a significant effect can be put down to the way in which it was manipulated in this study. Subjects were allowed to sit where they chose, hence the group condition simply consisted of several groups of two or t hree friends sitting in an amply sized room. This could easily be rectified in future studies by having subjects who are not acquainted with each other all sitting more closely together. Alternatively the variable could have been non-significant because h aving ones personal space invaded by the other subjects sitting all around you would not necessarily transfer to feelings about the room or the news reader.

The independent variables conceivably did have an effect on subjects' feelings of personal space and their emotional responses to the presentation, but these differences were not reflected in the questionnaire. However, as it has been used successfully by Lombard in 1995 and was constructed on the basis of consistent evidence, this seems unlikely. Interestingly, results for section 1. of the questionnaire varied very little from the mean, and that the mean in each condition was just under 5 - the median score on the nine point scale. Hence the subjects largely chose a middle value in this section, indicating that it was of little relevance and served only to confuse the subjects. On the other two sections of the questionnaire there were individual diffe rences in responses and still no significant differences of our manipulations were found. It would be suggested therefore that there is a problem in the theory or execution thereof rather than the questionnaire.

It would be interesting to do a follow-up study in a decade or more from now. Possibly televisions will have become so advanced by then that the mind is more easily duped into finding the stimulus invasive and more emotional responses provoked. Moreover in the future there may be virtual reality which may provide an even more pronounced effect on personal space. Looking further into the future, according to Lombard's evolutionary explanation for the effect of direct responses to television, the human br ain could eventually adapt to the idea that mediated experiences are not a threat and personal space may not be effected by any aspect of television at all. It is possible for now that there are other factors which may effect responses to television, for example whether they are in colour or not, and the volume level.

References

Argyle, M., and Dean, J. (1965). Eye-contact, distance and affiliation. Sociometry, 28, 289-304.

Baron, R. A. (1978). Invasions of personal space and helping: mediating effects of invader's apparent need. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 14, 304-312.

Burgoon, J. K. (1978). A communication model of personal space violations: Explication and an initial test. Human communications research, 4, 129-142.

Burgoon, J. K., and Aho, L. (1982). Three field experiments on the effects of conversational distance. Communication Monographs, 49, 58-79.

Burgoon, J. K., Stacks, D. W., and Burch, S. A. (1982). The role of interpersonal rewards and violations of distancing expectations in acheiving influence in small groups. Communication, 11, 114-128.

Burgoon, J. K., Stacks, D. W., and Woodall, G. W. (1979). A communicative model of violations of distancing expectations. Western Journal of Speech Communication, 43, 153-167.

Donohue, W. A., Diez, M. E., Stahle, R., and Burgoon, J. K. (1983) The effects of distance violations on verbal immediacy: An exploration. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication association, Dallas.

Efran, M. G., and Cheyne, J. A. (1974). Affective concomitants of the invasion of shared space: Behavioural, physiological, and verbal indicators. Journal of personality and Social Psychology, 29, 219-226.

Fisher, J. D., and Byrne, D. (1975). Too close for comfort: Sex differences to invasions of personal space. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 15-21.

Ickes, W., Patterson, M. L., Rajecki, D. W., and Tanford, S. (1982). Behavioural and cognitive consequences of reciprocal versus compensatory responses to pre-interaction expectancies. Social Cognition, 1, 160-190.

Imada, A. S., and Hakel, M. D. (1977). Influence of nonverbal communication and rater proximity on impressions and decisions in simulated employment interviews. Journal of Applied Psychology, 62, 285-300.

James, J. (1951). A preliminary study of the size determinant in small group interaction. American Sociological Review, XVl, 474-477.

Kraft, R. N. (1987). The influence of camera angle on comprehension and retention of pictorial events. Memory and Cognition, 15, 291-307.

Lombard, M. (1995). Direct responses to people on the screen: Television and personal space. Communication Research, 22, 288-324.

Lombard, M., Reich, R. D., Grabe, M. E., Campanella, C. M., and Ditton, T. B. (1995). Big TVs, Little Tvs: The Role of screen size in viewer responses to point-of-view movement. Paper presented to the Mass Communication division of the International Co mmunication Association, Albuquerque, NM.

Schiffenbauer, A., and Schiavo, R. S. (1976). Physical distance and attraction: An intensification effect. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 12, 274-282.

Smith, R. J., and Knowles, E. S., (1979) Affective and cognitive mediators of reactions to spatial invasions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 15, 437-452.

Sommer, R. (1969) Personal space; The behavioural basis of design. Prentice-Hall inc.

Stacks, D. W., and Burgoon, J. K. (1981). The role of nonverbal behaviours as distractors in resistance to persuasion in interpersonal contexts. Central States Speech Journal, 32, 61-73.

Storms, M. D., and Thomas, G. C. (1977). Reactions to physical closeness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 412-418.

1 Lombard infered this from studies cited by Burgoon: Baron, 1978; Burgoon, 1978; Burgoon and Aho, 1982; Burgoon, Stacks and Burch, 1982; Burgoon, Stacks and Woodall, 1979; Donohue, Diez, Stahle and Burgoon, 1983; Ickes, Patterson, Rajecki and Tanford, 19 82; Imada and Hakel, 1977; Schiffenbauer and Schiavo, 1976; Smith and Knowles, 1979; Stacks and Burgoon, 1981; Storms and Thomas, 1977.

2 Some questions had to be rephrased due to slight differences in Lombard's study, i.e. he used more than one news reader and had an extra control measure of neutral video footage. Only the phraseology and not the content of the questions was effected.

Please click the "Back" button on your browser to return to the psychology resources page.