The U-shaped relationship between age and interpersonal distance was surprising. The human infant’s need for physical contact to ensure healthy development has been well established. Developmental studies indicate that by kindergarten age, children are playing cooperatively with each other. It was expected, then, that the younger children would maintain a close physical relationship with their peers, with this distance widening as a function of age and acculturation until adult norms were reached. This expectation has been supported by previous research. The main purpose of the present experiment was to investigate further the relationship between age and interpersonal distance. Secondary purposes were to extend the study to include twelfth grade subjects and to look at approaches made to opposite-sexed as well as same-sexed peers. If the sex differences that occurred at sixth and ninth grades were a function of the earlier adolescence of girls, then these differences might be more pronounced when sex of person to be approached is introduced as a variable. The Horowitz, et al. (1964) study was used as a model again, because it offers a simple method for accurate measurement of interpersonal distances in a controlled situation.

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This paper deals with an idea of boundaries that christians and non-christians construct and the way these boundaries emerge and reproduce. Based on the analysis of twelve in-depth interviews, I show that the concept of moral boundaries is relevant for the relationship between christians and non-christians. Although many emphasize tolerance and understanding, they define themselves as opposed to each other in many ways. Christians consider God's commandments to be the source of morality, non-christians think it is rooted in people themselves. Christians consider relationship with God, love and good christian life to be the highest values and they think non-christians prefer money, health and family. Those admit these values, but they emphasize that being christian does not automatically mean being a good person. As a respond to today's situation, I analyze creating social distance and symbolic boundaries against ethnic and national minorities. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Prior research has shown a correlation between public stigma and emergency responders' perceptions of mental health patients while providing care. However, research examining public stigma and emergency responders' perceptions of mental health patients is limited in rural areas. The purpose of this study was to explore possible relationships between the dependent variable, public stigma, and the independent variables: social distance, blameworthiness, and fear of unpredictable behavior. Link's modified labeling theory was the theoretical framework for this study. A sample of 92 emergency responders obtained from Facebook completed a questionnaire that consisted of three Likert scales. A multiple regression showed little correlation between public stigma and social distance, blameworthiness, and fear of unpredictable behavior. Only .077 of the variance in public stigma was explained by the combination of independent variables. This study has demonstrated a possible shift in societal attitudes toward mental illness. It is important to determine the cause of this change in results so that continued education regarding mental health awareness may positively affect social change.

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This thesis examines how social distance in terms of different relationships affects the usage of linguistic resources, with a focus on the Spanish region Andalusia. The aim is to investigate how relationships between different interlocutors affect language, and particularly what different strategies of politeness are being used, and how these differ regarding each interlocutor presented. For the investigation, there are two main types of speech acts used: invitation and request. 30 native and residential Andalusians have participated in the investigation and answered a survey concerning several social situations. The results show that indirect types of politeness strategies are in general more produced when the social distance is extensive. Furthermore, the results of the investigation indicate that politeness strategies can also differ between interlocutors that do not reflect an exceeding social distance. The results presented in this thesis contribute to the research field of sociolinguistics with focus on how social distance affect the usage of politeness in the Andalusian region, which will be useful for making comparisons between different regions in the Spanish speaking world.

Leading multicultural teams is one of the main challenges faced by today’s leaders. The advantages often associated with multicultural teams (e.g., collaboration and integration of different knowledge, ideas, and approaches to a task) are often the major challenges in leading these teams. The literature on effective multicultural teams has identified leadership as an important factor for team effectiveness. Therefore, the goal of this study was to examine the effect of leader social distance in multicultural teams. A lab study was designed to test the impact of experimentally-manipulated leader social distance (socially close or socially distant) on the relationship between team member diversity and team affect, processes, and performance. Results varied for female and for male teams. Specifically, the nature of the interactions between leadership and team diversity depended on the specific cultural dimension measured and the gender of the team. In the end, the impact of diversity on culture in female teams was improved by close leaders (the relationships were positive), and worsened by distant leaders (the relationships were negative) for team affect, processes and viability. For male teams, the impact of diversity was always negative in both leader conditions; however, in distant leader conditions the relationship was more negative. Implications for theory and practice are discussed along with suggestions for future research.

Two essays comprise this doctoral dissertation on consumers and their charitable donations. The overall objective is to investigate the role of psychological distance in charitable donations, with each essay dealing with a different moderator of this relationship. In the first essay, I study the interactive effect of social distance and processing mode (affect vs. cognition). Specifically, people tend to donate more if they use their emotions rather than cognition as diagnostic inputs for decision making, especially when donor and recipient are separated by greater social distance. This may be because affect-driven and cognition-driven donors are influenced by different goals. Affect-driven donors are mainly motivated by a consummatory goal of increasing their “warm glow” utility whereas cognition-driven donors are mainly motivated by an instrumental goal of increasing “public goods” utility (i.e., making a contribution that may benefit the donor as well). While both consummatory and instrumental goals are relevant at closer social distance, only the consummatory goal is at work at greater social distance, which leads to a social distance by processing mode interaction. The hypothesized effect is tested in a series of three experiments that use different contexts and dependent measures (e.g., donation of money vs. time). iv In the second essay, I turn to the joint effect of psychological distance and dispositional empathy on charitable donation. Empathy or “Einfühlung” is defined as feeling one‟s way into the situation of another. While the literature suggests that empathy generally increases various forms of prosocial behavior including donations, I argue that this effect is contingent upon the psychological distance between donor and recipient. The role of empathy is especially pronounced when the recipient is perceived to be psychologically closer to the donor. This is because closer psychological distance leads to greater identification by the donor with the recipient, which in turn leads to greater donation. I demonstrated support for the hypothesized interaction between dispositional empathy and psychological distance in three experiments, each addressing a different type of psychological distance. I conclude this dissertation with a discussion of the theoretical contribution and managerial importance of the findings. Managers of not-for-profits are confronted with a multitude of challenges in increasing donations while optimizing their resources. By pointing out the processes that underlie individual donors‟ decisions on charitable donations, this dissertation addresses a long-felt but rarely addressed lacuna in the literature.

During pandemics such as the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID19), some government agencies might recommend that citizens keep distance to other people when moving in public environments; this distance is often referred to as social distancing. Since social distancing limits how people are allowed to move in an environment, it could prove to become an obstacle during situations such as evacuations. This raises the question if social distancing has a noticeable impact on evacuation times. Evacuation scenarios have previously been researched by utilizing crowd simulations. Therefore, this study uses an agent based crowd simulator developed in Unity3D to investigate the effects of social distancing on the time taken to conduct orderly evacuations of classroom environments. The virtual environments used were modeled after two differently sized classrooms at The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). The environments were modified with varying amounts of available exits and social distances between virtual agents in order to perform experiments. The results of the study indicate that increasing the degree of social distancing increases the evacuation time, whilst adding more exits reduces it. The significance of these changes in evacuation time are dependent on classroom size. The study concludes that although social distancing does increase evacuation time, the magnitude of the effect depends the previously mentioned environmental factors. / Under pandemier som COVID19 skulle vissa myndigheter kunna rekommendera medborgare att hålla avstånd från andra i allmänna miljöer; detta avstånd benämns ofta som social distansiering. Eftersom social distansiering begränsar antalet personer som får befinna sig i en miljö, skulle det kunna vara ett hinder under situationer som evaukeringar. Detta väcker frågan ifall social distansiering har en märkbar påverkan på evakueringstider. Evakueringsscenarier har tidigare studerats genom att utnyttja simuleringar av folkmassor. På grund av detta använder den här studien en agentbaserad simulator utvecklad i Unity3D, i syfte att undersöka effekten av social distansiering på tiden det tar att genomföra ordnade evakueringar av klassrum. De virtuella miljöer som användes modellerades efter två klassrum av olika storlek på KTH. Miljöerna modifierades med varierande antal tillgängliga utgångar och sociala avstånd mellan virtuella agenter för att utföra experiment. Resultaten av studien indikerar att en ökning av det sociala avståndet ökar evakueringstiden, medan en ökning av antal tillgängliga utgångar minskar den. Signifikansen av dessa förändringar i evakueringstid är beroende av klassrummens storlek. Studien fastslår att trots att social distansiering ökar evakueringstiden så beror magnituden av ökningen på de tidigare nämnda miljömässiga faktorerna.

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