14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new paper published in The Journal of Neuroscience, most people need to have a distance of about 20 - 40 centimeters (about 8 - 16 inches) between their face and other individuals / external stimuli.
This distance is dubbed peripersonal space and varies ever so slightly from one individual to the other.
Interestingly enough, researchers have found that people experiencing anxiety are likely to need a tad more peripersonal space than others do.
Thus, experiments have shown that anxious people react more strongly to stimuli located at a distance of just 20 centimeters from their face.
This means that they label various stimuli close to themselves as potentially dangerous both faster and more often than non-anxious people do.
Needless to say, this means that anxious people need less time to get defensive, EurekAlert details.
Researchers hope that these findings will prove useful when it comes to selecting people who are fit to work as fire, police, and military officers.