The Psychology of Friendship

Importantly, adolescents’ friendships also serve as training models to prepare for intimate romantic relationships (Fraley, Roisman, Booth-LaForce, Owen, & Holland, 2013; Simpson, Collins, Tran, & Haydon, 2007

Individuals develop strategies to make contacts, to start friendships, and to maintain but also to end voluntarily these relationships. Behavioral motifs vary by gender, social status, life stage, family status, and other personal characteristics. They are highly influenced by personality traits that moderate openness to new contacts

“there is nothing intrinsically natural about separating all human beings into two opposing categories on the basis of one physical attribute of their overall being-in-the-world” (Rawlins, 2009, p. 125

Interactive motifs are a person’s typical cognitive, affective, and behavioral propensities to think, feel, and act in certain ways across situations. Applied to relationships, interactive motifs reflect how individuals think about other people, respond to them emotionally, and engage with them.

During the formation of friendships, people reciprocate favors and support quickly to avoid the impression of exploiting the other person (Lydon, Jamieson, & Holmes, 1997). In established friendships, however, such tit-for-tat behavior (immediate reciprocation; Axelrod & Hamilton, 1981) is detrimental as people value balanced relationships,

people feel varying degrees of closeness among their various friends. The emotional closeness to friends often relates to how similar they are in their interests, values, and personality traits (Floyd, 1995; Montoya, Horton, & Kirchner, 2008; Morry, 2007; Suitor, 1987).

People differ in their networks and maintain either (1) relatively few long-term, emotionally close friends, (2) larger networks with close friends and also loose acquaintances, or (3) even social networks without friends and only family ties.

the Adams-Blieszner-Ueno integrative conceptual framework for friendship research (Figure 3.1), depicts friendship patterns as dynamic and contextualized. Individual characteristics, consisting of social structural positions and psychological dispositions, which affect each other through interpretation and internalization, lead to the development o

Children are more positively engaged with friends than nonfriends, with more smiling, talking, sharing, cooperating, and helping, and they show more effective task performance with friends. Although children are just as apt to engage in conflict with friends as with nonfriends, conflict resolution differs: Friends are more likely to use negotiation

More extraverted people dress more stylishly, behave more confidently, and express more positivity, for instance through smiling—factors that make extraverted people attractive to others and make others like them better (Back et al., 2011