Personal boundaries are necessary for privacy and autonomy, but vary between individuals and cultures. Portable technology adds stress to maintaining boundaries. Proxemics, or personal space, varies between cultures and can cause discomfort. Nonverbal communication is used to establish boundaries. Adjusting to new cultures may require adjusting personal boundaries temporarily. It is important to express comfort levels and values regarding boundaries to avoid failed relationships.
Personal boundaries are a set of physical and psychological limitations that individuals require to maintain a sense of privacy and autonomy in their daily lives. While what defines the acceptable limits for personal boundaries varies from individual to individual and even from culture to culture, there are common themes. Increasing levels of portable and easily accessible communication technologies have also served to add stress to the ability to maintain acceptable levels of distance and privacy within society.
Included in the concept of personal boundaries is the concept of acceptable behavior in social groups. Both religious and political beliefs and levels of economic and social status in a group will create a unique set of personal boundaries for each individual. What may be completely tolerable for one person as a conversation topic may be intolerable for another. Such violations of personal boundaries often remain hidden unless the offended individual is willing to face rejection and admit that the behavior is unacceptable to him or her.
Spatial empathy, or the study of proxemics, is an aspect of personal boundaries that is readily apparent when individuals mingle in unfamiliar social settings or cultures. Humans maintain a personal space, or bubble of territory, around them as they move, with a psychological claim to it as their own. When this is violated, it can be a violation of personal boundaries. Proxemics is the study of how this space is defined by individual cultures and includes not only individual space but also the space allotted to distinguish houses and cities from one another.
Citizens of the United States and Northern Europe tend to define personal space as larger than people of other cultures, which is the distance close enough to shake hands, or about 2.5 feet (0.8 meters), while concepts of personal space Latin American or Middle Eastern may be less than 1 foot (0.3 meters). This has the net result of social gatherings where those with larger defined spaces distance themselves from those with more confined spaces, who are forced to continually approach each other, creating discomfort for both groups. Conversely, some Asian cultures such as Japan demonstrate even greater personal space, where the practice of bowing requires at least three feet (0.91 meters) distance from the other individual.
Merging acceptable personal boundaries involves nonverbal communication, such as hand gestures and body movements, which are known to be an important part of how humans convey emotion. Nonverbal communication is used to communicate personal boundaries in two ways. Or is it composed of symbolic gestures intended to establish levels of assertiveness such as a thumbs-up gesture or a raised fist, which can be a bullying gesture used to limit someone else’s personal boundaries. Such communication may also be composed of conversational gestures coordinated with speech to convey a greater sense of group meaning and solidarity.
Environmental psychology suggests that when an individual has blended into a culture or social group other than their own, it is their obligation to adjust their personal boundaries to more closely align with those of the group, at least on a temporary basis. At the same time, most of the recommendations of social psychology is that individuals be more explicit in expressing their comfort level and values regarding boundaries as the natural inclination is to suppress them. However, when those boundaries are rebuilt, it can often lead to failed relationships, as stark differences prevent close interaction.
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