There has been a growing interest in the behavioral aspects of physical space vrfiich has generally been considered as an important part of the man-environment interphase (Craik, 1970; Esser, 1971; Hall, 1966; Pastalan & Carson, 1970; Proshansky, Ittleson & Rivlin, I97O; Sommer, 1969; Wholwill & Carson, 1972). One aspect of physical space vdiich has received increasing attention is personal space (PS), PS can be defined as the area surrounding a person^s body into v^ich intruders may not come (Sommer, 1969). This paper which is comprised of three major sections; the intro duction, description of the experiments and discussion, presents a thorough review of the literature and includes a discussion of methodological difficulties in PS research. In addition, a brief overview of theoretical work in the area is discussed. Following this, each experiment is presented including methods and results. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of the results and exposition of a theoretical model of PS.