Why are some people afraid of enclosed spaces?

Does the thought of going into a cave or tunnel fill you with dread? Do you break out in a sweat even just imagining getting stuck in a lift?

Fear of enclosed spaces is an understandable one. In severe cases it’s known as claustrophobia.

But why do some people experience this fear more than others? It could be associated with how we estimate our personal space, new findings suggest.

The study, details of which are published in the journal Cognition, asked 35 young adults to visually bisect lines in a square room.

This allowed the researchers to work out how the participants registered their individual bubbles of personal space.

What they found was that, when asked, people with larger personal or “near” spaces reported higher rates of claustrophobia than people with smaller near spaces.

However, while it’s an interesting correlation, the study authors point out that their findings do not allow for strong conclusions about cause, and the area needs to be explored further.

“We’ve found that people who are higher in claustrophobic fear have an exaggerated sense of the near space surrounding them,” says Emory University psychologist Stella Lourenco, who led the research.

“At this point, we don’t know whether it’s the distortion in spatial perception that leads to the fear, or vice versa. Both possibilities are likely.”