Space Invasion - Assignment 1

For my Interpersonal Communications class we had an assignment that we had to complete, and then make a blog post describing what happened.
For our first assignment, I had to invade somebody's personal space. I chose to use my mother-in-law as my test experiment in this assignment. I chose her because she is not a "touchy feeling" type of person. She does not get physically close with very many people, so I thought if I invaded her space she would notice.



My husband and I spent the evening with her and on 3 occasions during the evening I got abnormally close to her. Her response was a little tough to read. She never verbally recognized the fact that I was invading her space, which was a surprise to me. On all three occasions I would kind of creep closer to her, and it seemed like on all three occasions as soon as i got too close, she would walk away.
She didn't just step back, she would stop what it was that she was doing and leave and go do something else. I think this is because she didn't want to verbally or non verbally recognize the fact that I was invading her space. So her idea of fixing the fact that I was too close was to just leave the situation all together.  Her verbal communication did lessen with the closer that I stood to her, as if she was afraid to talk with me being so close.


It was kind of awkward for me to be that close to her, since we do not communicate physically too often. I was kind of nervous to stand that close to her because I didn't know how she was going to react. It was kind of fun to invade her space and make her feel awkward, I may do this experiment with other people later on to see what kind of other reactions I can get.