Week 10: L2: The Nature Of Friendship Flashcards
3 themes of friendship
- affective: share personal thoughts and feelings
- communal: participate in communal activities, similarity, and giving and receiving practical assistance
- sociable: source of amusement, fun and recreation
- defintion: voluntary, personal rship, typically providing intimacy and assistance, in which two parties like one another and seek each others company
Attributes of friendship
Someone with whom: - we are intimate, can trust - depend on - shares, is accepting, caring - we are close, enjoy Additional attributes - equality - authenticity - respect
Types of friendship
- casual (numerous)
- close (typically 4-6)
- best (typ. 1)
Married men freq refer to wives as ‘best friends’ but not vica versa
What are friends for?
Responsiveness
- attentive and supportive recognition of our needs
Capitalization
- good friends enhance out delight when we share good news or events with them
Social support
- emotional, advice, material
How friendship differs from love
- Both include positive and warm evaluations, but romantic love includes fascination, sexual desire and exclusivity
- fships have less restrictive social norms and are easier to dissolve
- fships less likely to involve overt expressions of positive emotions and friends generally spend less free time together than romantic partners do
Friendship in infancy
1 year
- capable of complementary and reciprocal interactions
2 yrs
- pairs of children sometimes gravitate towards one another
- play is associative, cooperative and enjoyable
Preschool years
- label playmates as friends
Friendship in childhood
- grow richer and more complex
- partly due to cog dev -> children are increasingly able to take others perspectives, understand other viewpoints
Stages of childhood friendship (Selman, 1981)
Before 10
- fair weather cooperation: friendships self-interest rather than mutual interests
Middle school 10-13 yrs
- intimate-mutual sharing: collaboration that serves everyone’s interests
- exclusive and possessive rship
Teen yrs (13+)
- autonomous independence: no single fship can fulfill all needs
Success in childhood fshipsay pave the way for better adult outcomes
Friendship in adolescence and young adulthood
Adolescence
- less time is spent w families and more time with peers
- friends are increasingly turned to increasingly to satisfy important attachment needs
- no of opposite-sex fships increase
- fships may involve arguments, teasing, competition, and peer pressure
Young adulthood
- intimacy vs isolation
- after college = fewer friends, but deeper, more interdependent fships
Friendships in mid-life
- Dyadic withdrawal: more time is spent w romantic partner, less with friends
- esp affects fem friendships and opposite-sex fships
- fships w other couples and w other parents may prosper
Fships in old age
Elderly have smaller social networks and fewer friends than young people -> esp men. Why?
- social barriers to friendship
- disengagement perspective
- quality vs quantity argument
Elderly who have good friends love longer and have healthier lives that those with fewer social connections
Gender diffs in fships
Women: face-2-face - emotional sharing and disclosure - Women closer and more intimate Men: side-by-side - shared activities, companionship and fun
Close male fships
- men stimes lack friends to turn to for sensitive, sympathetic understanding and support
- men capable of being expressive and close as women, but choose not to be. Why?
• social role norms
• when norms make it appropriate, men self-disclose more than w
• cultural differences
Can men and w be close friends?
- common but post-university intimate cross-sex fships can be difficult to maintain. Why?
• determining whether rship is fship or romantic
• problems of sexual tension
• cross-sex fship can be tricky when ppl are married to others
Individual difference in fship
High need for intimacy - high self-disclosure and loyalty - behave more kindly towards friends - share more and listen more Depression - can struggle with social interactions - engage in a pattern of excessive reassurance seeking - cyclical rship: interpersonal rejection -> unfriendliness -> harder to attract friends
Shyness
- definition: combines social reticence as inhibition behaviour with nervous discomfort is social settings
- 80% of ppl have exp shyness
- feel: self-conscious, inept, uncomfortable, worried, ineffective
- chronic shyness: fear negative eval from others, poor self-reward, lower social skills
- engage in cyclical behavior: adopt a cautious and withdrawn style interaction that deflects interest and enthusiasm from others
Loneliness
- occurs when we want more, or more satisfying, connections with others than we currently have
• social isolation vs emotional isolation - some personal characteristics
•48% is genetic
• insecure attachment
• men lonelier than w on average
Friendships and gossip
- sharing neg attitudes about others promotes closeness and fship
• more so than positive information - establishes in-group vs out-group boundaries
- may be more positive for males than females
• enhance individual bonding in make fships
• f more likely to view in-group gossiping as threatening to the fship
Enemies
Contrast b/w fship initiation and enemyship initiation
- friends - grow together and occasionally click
- enemies - typically can’t understand how it happened; sudden and mysterious
Enemies
- hold power over target
- make people feel suspicious and anxious; neg about themselves
- have power to damage reputations through gossip and lies, or damage status and financial position
