Getting Closer or Stepping Back? Personal Space Adjustments Following Facial Emotion Imitation and Observation
Abstract
Regulating personal space (PS) is essential for navigating social interactions. Although emotional cues are known to influence PS, the mechanisms underlying this modulation remain poorly understood. The present study investigated whether active facial emotion imitation is followed by changes in PS regulation and whether these changes differ from those observed following passive emotion observation. Participants completed a Virtual Reality Stop-Distance task to assess their preferred interpersonal distances from angry, happy, and neutral virtual agents, before and after an imitation session, during which they actively imitated angry or happy facial expressions. Following emotion imitation, participants exhibited a bidirectional modulation of PS: they increased their distance from angry virtual agents and decreased it from happy virtual agents, while no changes were observed for neutral agents. These findings suggest that active facial imitation enhances sensitivity to emotional signals and adaptively modulates interpersonal distance. Eye-tracking analyses revealed no significant changes in gaze behavior between pre- and post-imitation sessions, indicating that the reported effects were not driven by differences in overt visual attention. In a second experiment using a similar pre-post design, a new group of participants passively observed the same emotional expressions without imitating them. Results showed that, after emotion observation, angry virtual agents elicited an increased interpersonal distance, whereas no changes in distance from either the happy or neutral virtual agents were observed. Together, these results indicate that defensive distancing from others’ angry expressions followed both active imitation and passive observation, whereas the approach-related reduction in distance in response to happy expressions was evident after active imitation only. These findings highlight the contribution of emotional-cue exposure to personal space regulation in social contexts and provide further evidence that emotional experience can dynamically shape interpersonal behavior.
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BibTeX
@misc{patane2026getting,
title = {{Getting Closer or Stepping Back? Personal Space Adjustments Following Facial Emotion Imitation and Observation}},
author = {Ivan Patané and Clément Desoche and ALESSANDRO FARNE and Fadila Hadj-Bouziane},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/ud87j_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ud87j_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Getting Closer or Stepping Back? Personal Space Adjustments Following Facial Emotion Imitation and Observation
AU - Ivan Patané
AU - Clément Desoche
AU - ALESSANDRO FARNE
AU - Fadila Hadj-Bouziane
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/24
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/ud87j_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ud87j_v1/
AB - Regulating personal space (PS) is essential for navigating social interactions. Although emotional cues are known to influence PS, the mechanisms underlying this modulation remain poorly understood. The present study investigated whether active facial emotion imitation is followed by changes in PS regulation and whether these changes differ from those observed following passive emotion observation. Participants completed a Virtual Reality Stop-Distance task to assess their preferred interpersonal distances from angry, happy, and neutral virtual agents, before and after an imitation session, during which they actively imitated angry or happy facial expressions. Following emotion imitation, participants exhibited a bidirectional modulation of PS: they increased their distance from angry virtual agents and decreased it from happy virtual agents, while no changes were observed for neutral agents. These findings suggest that active facial imitation enhances sensitivity to emotional signals and adaptively modulates interpersonal distance. Eye-tracking analyses revealed no significant changes in gaze behavior between pre- and post-imitation sessions, indicating that the reported effects were not driven by differences in overt visual attention. In a second experiment using a similar pre-post design, a new group of participants passively observed the same emotional expressions without imitating them. Results showed that, after emotion observation, angry virtual agents elicited an increased interpersonal distance, whereas no changes in distance from either the happy or neutral virtual agents were observed. Together, these results indicate that defensive distancing from others’ angry expressions followed both active imitation and passive observation, whereas the approach-related reduction in distance in response to happy expressions was evident after active imitation only. These findings highlight the contribution of emotional-cue exposure to personal space regulation in social contexts and provide further evidence that emotional experience can dynamically shape interpersonal behavior.
ER -