The Ultimate Body Language Book

stranger but she will instinctively drop her head and avert her gaze sideways, being careful to make no
emotion facial expressions. In doing so, she avoids emitting the wrong message and therefore prevents
unwanted solicitation. Men are often victims of assuming any eye contact is flirtatious, even if it
happens by accident, thus women are generally careful of whom they look at directly. Some women
learn this through a bad experience; others seem to know it instinctively. Men can test this out for
themselves by trying to secure eye contact with women as they pass them on the street. Men are rarely
able to secure eye contact from strangers and it’s usually not for a lack of trying.
Chapter 4 – Space and Territory
Spatial Empathy
This ‘fugitive’ is trying to escape a space invader.
“Spatial empathy” is an informal term used by expatriate workers in Hong Kong and then later in Japan
and China who were typically from Australia, England, France and the United States. The term was use
to describe the awareness that individuals have about how their proximity affects the comfort of the
people around them. Even though cities such as Hong Kong, Japan and China were westernized, the
walkways and public transport system were very crowded by comparison. The expatriates found that
preventing intrusion into their personal space was difficult and at times impossible.
The foreign workers that were not accustomed to physical closeness and physical contact were made to
feel violated by the locals. They felt that their privacy was being infringed upon and that their personal
space requirements weren’t being met. What the workers failed to realize was that it was their
responsibility to adapt to the cultural norms of the locals and not the other way around so while the
locals had no spatial empathy the workers had no cultural empathy.
While spatial empathy was first coined to describe the differences between cultures it also has
application within cultures as some people have different levels of tolerance with regards to their
personal space. Naturally, it is your choice to decide what you will do with someone else’s preference,