Chapter 7: Friendship

Objectives:

 Define friendship, and describe it’s three attributes (i.e., affection,

communion, and companionship).
 Discuss the differences between friendship and love using the five
components that characterize rewarding intimacy (i.e., respect, trust,
capitalization, social support, and responsiveness).
 Describe the complexities of social support in close relationships.
 Identify the rules of friendship and discuss how likely are people to
follow them and whether these rules are linked to relationship success
or not.
 Describe the three key interpersonal needs identified by Buhrmester
and Furman for children over the course of their lives.
 Discuss people’s relationships during their adolescence, including
evidence from an experience-sampling study in Chicago, and the four
components of attachment identified by attachment theorists.
 Describe intimacy in individuals’ relationships during their young
adulthood and explain how it might change during their transition to
college.
 Explain the nature of dyadic withdrawal in midlife.
 Explain why socioemotional selectivity theory argues that elderly
people have smaller social networks and fewer friends than younger
people do.
 Discuss why women’s same-sex friendships are more intimate than
men’s same-sex friendships.
 Explain how cultural norms and gender roles inhibit intimacy in
American men.
 Describe the different types of individual differences in friendships and
their impact on friendships.
 Identify the qualities that differentiate people with an interdependent
self-construal from those who view themselves as independent agents
and list the characteristics that make interdependent people desirable
friends.
 Discuss how men and women can be close friends even though certain
barriers can complicate these cross-sex friendships. Describe the
complexities of sexual attraction within a close cross-sex friendship.
 Discuss the major components of shyness.
 Describe the characteristics that distinguish shy individuals from other
individuals and discuss how shy people interact and act in their social
life.
 Summarize the research evidence on how excuses for poor interactions
affect the anxiety levels of shy people and describe the impact of these
findings on one’s shyness.
 Discuss loneliness and its different facets.
 Describe the UCLA Loneliness Scale and the three themes that would
result in high loneliness scores.
 Describe the effects of loneliness on people’s health and how
loneliness varies with other attributes that could be more changeable.
 Explain how loneliness and shyness appear similar but differ in several
key aspects (e.g., interpersonal behaviors).
 Suggest some methods to overcome loneliness.
Chapter Outline

1. The Nature of Friendship.

2. Friendship across the Life Cycle.
3. Differences in Friendship.
4. Friendship Difficulties.
The Nature of Friendship
Friendships are based on the same building blocks of intimacy as romances
are, but the mix of components is usually different.

This chapter details what it means to like an intimate partner.

Attributes of Friendship

Friendships are characterized by three themes:

- Affection: friend like, trust, and care for each other.

- Communion: friends provide reliable help and support.
- Companionship: friends are sources of recreation and fun.

What are the differences between friendship and love?

Compared to romances, friendships are:

- Less passionate.
- Less exclusive.
- Less confining, entailing fewer obligations to one’s partner.
- Less likely to involve overt expressions of positive emotion.

Still, rich friendships are intimate relationships, involving:

- Respect.
- Trust.
- Capitalization.
- Social support.
- Responsiveness.

Capitalization occurs when others enthusiastically enhance our happiness by

being excited when good things happen to us.

Social support may come in four forms:

- Emotional support in the form of affection and acceptance.

- Physical comfort in the form of hugs and cuddling.
- Advice support in the form of information and guidance.
- Material support in the form of money and goods.

Sensitive support from others reduces our stress and draws us closer to
them, but some people are better providers of social support than others are.

People with secure attachment styles give more effective support than
insecure people do.
The best support meets our needs and preferences.

- And as a result, the best help is often invisible support that is provided
without fanfare and that actually goes unnoticed by the recipient.
- However, it’s not what people do for us by what we think they do for
us that matters in the long run and we perceive our partners to be
more supportive when we are happy with them and securely attached
to them.

Responsiveness involves the attentive and supportive recognition of our

needs and interests.

- We are drawn to those who lead us to feel valued, protected, and

understood because perceived partner responsiveness, the judgement
that someone is attentive, caring, and supportive, is powerfully
rewarding.

The Rules of Friendship

Rules for relationship are shared cultural beliefs about what behaviors
friends should and should not perform. There are standards of conduct in
friendships that can make or break those relationships.

Rules of friendship

- Don’t nag.
- Keep confidences.
- Show emotional support.
- Volunteer help in time of need.
- Trust and confide in your partner.
- Share news of success with your partner.
- Don’t be jealous of each other’s relationships.
- Stand up for your partner in his or her absence.
- Seek to repay debts and favors and compliments.
- Strive to make him or her happy when you’re together.

Friendship Across the Life Cycle

Childhood

Preschool children can be said to have rudimentary friendships.

- Children’s friendships gradually become richer and more complex as

they age.
 - The sophisticated ways in which adults conduct their friendships are
years in the making.

Different interpersonal needs may be preeminent at different ages:

- Acceptance during elementary school.

- Intimacy during middle school.
- Sexuality during high school.

Adolescence

Teens spend less and less time with their families and more and more time
with their peers.

They also increasingly turn to their friends for the satisfaction of important
attachment needs.

Attachment theorists identify 4 components of attachment

1. Proximity seeking.
2. Separation protest.
3. Safe haven.
4. Secure base.

As they grow older, adolescents gradually shift their primary attachments

from their parents to their peers in a component-by-component fashion.

Young Adulthood

According to classic theory, young adults are in a stage in which they

develop either “intimacy” or “isolation.”

And after college, they tend to interact with fewer friends but have deeper,
more interdependent relationships with the friends they do have.

Midlife

A pattern of dyadic withdrawal occurs when people settle into romantic

relationships:

- As they see more and more of a lover, they see less and less of their
friends, particularly their friends of the other sex.

Friendship Networks and Marital Adjustment

Spouses encounter more frustrations and difficulties when they have no
friends in common.

Old Age

Elderly people have smaller social networks than younger people do.

They have just as many close friends as they did when they were younger,
but they spend less time with casual friends.

The best explanation comes from Socioemotional selectivity theory, which

holds that, because they’re focused on the present instead of the future,
elderly people seek quality, not quantity, in their close relationships.

Differences in Friendship
Gender Differences in Same-Sex Friendships

Women’s friendships are characterized by emotional sharing and self-

disclosure.

Men’s friendships revolve around shared activities, companionship, and

competition.

To some extent, women’s friendships are “face-to-face,” whereas men’s

friendships are “side-to-side.”

Individual Differences in Friendship

Another personal characteristic that influences our social networks is sexual

orientation.
Most heterosexuals don’t have lesbian, gay, or bisexual friends, but most
LGBs do have straight friends.

Those with relational self-construals think of themselves as interdependent,

rather than independent beings.

- They understand others well and strive to benefit others as well as

themselves.
- So, they make good friends.

But beware of the Dark Triad, three traits that promote behavior that is
arrogant, manipulative, exploitative, cold, and hostile:

- Narcissism: arrogant self-importance, entitlement, and selfishness.

- Machiavellianism: being cynical, duplicitous, and manipulative and
readily lying for one’s self-interest.
- Psychopathy: impulsivity and callous disregard for others’ feelings and
well-being.

Notably, the self-confidence and cleverness of these folks can be attractive,

at least at first. But over time, they make lousy friends.

Shyness

Most of us have experiences shyness.

- It’s the syndrome that combines social reticence and inhibited

interactive behavior with nervous discomfort in social settings.

When people are shy, they fret about social disapproval and feel ill at ease in
social situations.

- As a result, they interact with others in an impoverished manner.

- If they don’t avoid interaction altogether, they behave in an inhibited,
guarded fashion; they look at others less, smile less, speak less often,
and converse less responsively.

Burdened by a fear of disapproval and doubting themselves, shy people

adopt a cautious, relatively withdrawn style of interaction.

- The irony here is that by behaving in such a timid manner, people who
are either temporarily or chronically shy often make the negative
impressions on others that they were hoping to avoid in the first place.

Interpersonal Effects of Shyness

The timid and reticent behavior that characterizes shyness can seem aloof
and unfriendly, thereby eliciting less warmth and acceptance from others.

Friendship Difficulties
However. Most shy people probably do no need formal training in interaction
skills because they do just fine when they relax and quit worrying about how
they’re being judged

If you’re troubled by shyness now, you may make better impressions on

others if you actually care less about what they think.

When shy people have an excuse for an interaction to go badly, they remain
relatively relaxed and do not act shy.

If your shyness comes and goes depending on whether others can see you,
you probably don’t need additional training in basic social skills.

What you do need is greater calm and self-confidence.

- That may not be easy to come by, but you should consider the
alternative:
 o You’re not winning friends and influencing people by acting shy,
so what do you have to lose by trusting yourself and expecting
interactions to go well?

Loneliness

Loneliness is a feeling of deprivation and dissatisfaction that emerges from a

discrepancy between the kind of social relations we want and the kind we
have.

Loneliness has two different facets:

1. In social loneliness, people are dissatisfied because they lack a social

network of friends and acquaintances.
2. In emotional loneliness, people are lonely because they lack affection
and emotional support from at least one intimate relationship.

If we lack the kind of relationship we desire, we can be lonely despite having

other quite rewarding social interactions.

- Thus, loneliness depends on both our perceptions and our desires and
on a mismatch between the amount of intimacy we want and the
amount we have.

Measuring Loneliness

The UCLA Loneliness Scale contains three different themes that produce high
loneliness scores:

1. Isolation from others: “How often do you feel alone?”

2. Lack of close connection to others: “How often do you feel that no
one really knows you well?”
3. Too little social connection to people in general: “How often do you
feel that there is no one you can turn to?”
a. Curiously, because people do no like to admit that they’re
“lonely,” the scale does not use that word.

Loneliness matters.

It has physiological effects that have direct impact on health

- Lonely people have higher blood pressure and weaker immune

systems, and lonely people over the age of 50 are more likely to die in
the next six years than are those with richer connections to others.

Characteristics Associated with Loneliness

 - Genetic influences: Some people are born being more likely than
others to experience bouts of loneliness in life.
- Personality: Higher levels of extraversion, agreeableness, and
conscientiousness reduce the chances that we’ll be lonely; higher
levels of negative emotionality increase that chance.
- Insecure Attachment: People with secure styles of attachment tend
to be less lonely than those who are insecure.
- Low Self-Esteem: People who don’t have satisfying connections to
others tend not to like themselves very much.
- Gender: Men who have close relationships with other women tend to
be much less lonely.

o However, this pattern does not pertain to androgynous men who

possess expressive traits such as warmth and sensitivity.
o It’s more accurate to conclude that it is macho men, who are low
in expressivity, who are dependent on women to avoid being
lonely.

Interpersonal Behaviors

The distress and desperation lonely people feel is evident in negative

attitudes toward others; they mistrust others and dislike the very people
from whom they seek acceptance and regard.

- Their interactions are drab and dull

- Their passivity and low responsiveness are unrewarding or annoying to
others.

Coping with Loneliness

- Hopefulness is more likely to cure loneliness than dour pessimism is.

- To overcome loneliness, seek new friendships, not romances.
- Watch out for sour attitudes and stay positive.
- Patiently recognize that friendship takes time.