Close Encounters of the Stressful Kind: Affective, Physiological, and Behavioral Reactions to the Experience of Crowding

Ninety-six adults participated in a study of the joint effects of interpersonal density and an additional stressor. Experiential reports, psychophysiological indices, and task performance were assessed. Subjects seated either close together or far apart worked on a series of tasks while either expecting a stressful event or not expecting the stressful event. Perceptions of crowding were influenced only by interpersonal distance; those seated close together reported feeling more crowded than those seated far apart. However, if subjects were both crowded and expected a stressful event they reported feeling more stressed and evidenced psychophysiological signs of anxiety. Relevance of these results for an additive stress model is discussed but the model is rejected and an interactional model of crowding and stress effects is proposed. Evidence for processes of social comparison fear reduction was found in some crowded subjects. One major stumbling block to the development of a systematic theory of crowding has been the failure to satisfactorily define what is meant by "crowding." Early researchers defined crowding in terms of physical density, the number of individuals per unit of space (Calhoun, 1962; Christian, 1961; Freedman, Heshka, & Levy, 1975; Freedman, Klevansky, & Ehrlich, 1971; Galle, Gove, & McPherson, 1972; Griff i tt & Veitch, 1971). Subsequent investigations have failed to find negative effects to be reliably associated with density and, as the definition of density raises a number of conceptual problems (Loo, 1973), alternate definitions