Humans are social beings whose interaction with others constitutes an important part of our well-being. In these social interactions there are certain factors that are essential for us to feel comfortable. One of these factors is to keep a proper “breathing space”. A physical distance to whom we interact, to not have our personal space violated. This space we keep to others is called interpersonal distance (IPD) and might be altered depending on the situation. In the recent decade the neural correlates of IPD have been investigated. The current systematic review aimed to investigate the existing literature on the neural correlations of IPD and how it relates to IPD-behaviour. A systematic search was made in the electric databases Scopus and PubMed. Nine articles remained to be reviewed after screening and selection was done.The results showed the superior parietal cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex, motor areas, occipital areas, and the amygdala to be the most prominent structural brain areas to be involved in IPD. Some functional connections between mentioned brain areas were found but needs to be replicated for better knowledge. The review provides insight into the neural nature of IPD and its behavioural basis.

Human spatial behavior has been the focus of hundreds of previous research studies. However, the conclusions and generalizability of previous studies on interpersonal distance preferences were limited by some important methodological and sampling issues. The objective of the present study was to compare preferred interpersonal distances across the world and to overcome the problems observed in previous studies. We present an extensive analysis of interpersonal distances over a large data set (N = 8,943 participants from 42 countries). We attempted to relate the preferred social, personal, and intimate distances observed in each country to a set of individual characteristics of the participants, and some attributes of their cultures. Our study indicates that individual characteristics (age and gender) influence interpersonal space preferences and that some variation in results can be explained by temperature in a given region. We also present objective values of preferred interpersonal distances in different regions, which might be used as a reference data point in future studies.