The Psychology of Friendship

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

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.

“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

Friends typically are defined as people who mutually select each other for friendship; with whom one shares companionship, interests, and values; in whom one can confide; and for whom one feels concern and affection. Friends are expected to be trustworthy with respect to giving solid advice and holding confidences, to engage in appropriate levels o

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

the average number of relationships in social networks ranges from 3 to 40 (Wrzus et al., 2013

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

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.