Why are so many of the commenters on this page acting as if they were personally attacked? Nowhere in the article are "fear responses" described as bad or unusual.
The knee-jerk hostility and lack of any sense of irony is quite telling.
The knee-jerk hostility and lack of any sense of irony is quite telling.
(I think the initials you were looking for there were FDR)
I have never really thought about personal space being a fear response before. I always just thought I hated other people breathing on me.
(Just as an additional anecdote of the flip side of this, I have no personal space issues -- I like crowds and subways -- and have somewhat reckless tendencies)
What got to me is not the title, but the way how an fascinating topic was dragged down to the gutter and then just choked to death.
I mean personal space is just another boundary, which one has to cross to "get up close and personal". It is an act of aggression. Now who displays that aggression, is what determines what kind of response you'll get. If it's your sweetheart in a sexy mood, the response will be sexual. If it's a skinhead with a knife, it will be a fear response. The action is the same: violation of personal space; the circumstances are not. You could write a dissertation on that alone. And well here we have a person obviously not in the field, writing a biology column on neuroscience using one quote of neuroscientist and a case study of a brain-damaged patient to drive her point that "personal space is a fear response" and not even doing that well. Sorry. The article is just bad.
Personally, since personal space is known to be very culturally specific, I'd like to see if the physiological responses they measured similarly differ by culture. (They may not be measuring personal space phenomena at all.)