Ch 7 Friendship Lecture Notes Fall 2024 PDF

Ch 7 Friendship Fall 2024 P375 Dr. Adams © McGraw Hill 1  Today’s Outline The Nature of Friendship Friendship across the Life Cycle Differences in Friendship Chapter 7...

Ch 7 Friendship Fall 2024 P375 Dr. Adams © McGraw Hill 1  Today’s Outline The Nature of Friendship Friendship across the Life Cycle Differences in Friendship Chapter 7 Participation Friendship Difficulties – Loneliness (teaser) © McGraw Hill 2  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: friends like, trust, and care for each other. Communion: friends provide reliable help and support. Companionship: friends are sources of recreation and fun due to shared interests and activities. Friendship: a voluntary, personal relationship, typically providing intimacy and assistance, in which the two parties like one another and seek each other’s company. © McGraw Hill 3  The Nature of Friendship What are the differences between friendship and love? Compared to romances, friendships are: Less passionate. Like and Love share many characteristics, but Love involves stronger, more complex feelings. Less exclusive. Social norms permit many friendships, while monogamous romances require exclusive loyalty. © McGraw Hill 4  The Nature of Friendship What are the differences between friendship and love? Compared to romances, friendships are: Less confining, entailing fewer obligations to one’s partner. This makes friendships easier to dissolve. Less likely to involve overt expressions of positive emotion. Positive affections tends to be less intimate than with a romantic partner, and this goes for same- and cross-sex friendships. © McGraw Hill 5  The Nature of Friendship Still, rich friendships are intimate relationships, involving: Respect. Traits worthy of respect include: commendable moral qualities, consideration of others, acceptance of others, honesty, and willingness to listen to others. Trust. Takes time to cultivate, resulting from feeling someone is alert to our wishes and reliably behaves unselfishly toward us. A loss of trust in any close relationship is hard to recover from. Capitalization. Occurs when others enthusiastically enhance our happiness by being excited when good things happen to us. Social Support. Responsiveness. © McGraw Hill 6  The Nature of Friendship Social support, in which others provide us help and encouragement, may come in four forms: Emotional support in the form of affection, acceptance, and reassurance. Physical comfort in the form of hugs and cuddling. Advice support in the form of information and guidance. Material support in the form of tangible assistance, such as money or goods. Keep in mind that these forms of support can, and often do, overlap. Sensitive, responsive support from others reduces our stress and draws us closer to them, but some people are better providers of social support than others are. Attachment styles matter! People with secure attachment styles give more effective support than insecure people do. Either they provide less help (avoidant), or their help is intrusive and controlling (anxious) © McGraw Hill 7  The Nature of Friendship The best support meets our needs and preferences. Sometimes support from others can be the wrong type or too plentiful. Their well-meaning efforts may threaten our self-esteem or be intrusive. And as a result, the best help is often invisible support that is provided without fanfare and that actually goes unnoticed by the recipient. Sometimes the best way to help, is to do so unobtrusively in a manner that does not add to the recipient’s woes. However, it’s not what people do for us, but 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. © McGraw Hill 8  The Nature of Friendship Responsiveness involves: Attentive and supportive recognition of our needs and interests. Making it probably the most important factor of the all! We are drawn to those who lead us to feel valued, protected, and understood because of perceived partner responsiveness, the judgment that someone is attentive, caring, and supportive, which is powerfully rewarding. If a partnership does not provide us with such rewards, we probably wouldn’t become/stay friends with them. *Remember, we encountered PPR back in Chapter 5 when we discussed it’s influence within self-disclosure!* PPR during self-disclose promotes intimacy -> trust & interdependency © McGraw Hill 9  The Nature of Friendship The Rules of Friendship. We don’t often explicate our expectations about what it means to be a friend, but most of us nevertheless have rules of friendship. Rules for relationships 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. © McGraw Hill 10  The Nature of Friendship 10 Rules of Friendship 1. Don’t nag. 2. Keep confidences. 3. Show emotional support. 4. Volunteer help in time of need. 5. Trust and confide in your partner. 6. Share news of success with your partner. 7. Don’t be jealous of each other’s relationships. 8. Stand up for your partner in their absence. 9. Seek to repay debts and favors and compliments. 10. Strive to make them happy when you’re together. No need to write these down – I want you to reflect upon them instead. © McGraw Hill 11  Friendship across the Life Cycle Different interpersonal needs may be preeminent at different ages: We seek: Acceptance from peers during elementary school. Those not sufficiently accepted feel excluded. Intimacy with a friend who is similar in age and interests during middle school. Children develop skills of perspective taking, empathy, and generosity that are the foundation for close adult relationships. Sexuality (interest in others of desire sex) during high school. Hormones, desires, and dating…oh my!! © McGraw Hill 12  Friendship across the Life Cycle Childhood. Preschool children can be said to have rudimentary friendships (“favorite playmates”). Children’s friendships gradually become richer and more complex as they increase in cognitive development. The sophisticated ways in which adults conduct their friendships are years in the making. 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. © McGraw Hill 13  Friendship across the Life Cycle Attachment theorists identify four components of attachment: Proximity Seeking. Approaching, staying near, or making contact with an attachment figure (AF). Separation Protest. Resistance to being separated to AF and are distressed when separated. Safe Haven. Turning to AF for comfort and support in times of stress. Secure Base. Using AF as a foundation for exploration of novel environments and daring exploits. As they grow older, adolescents gradually shift their primary attachments from their parents to their peers in a component-by-component fashion. © McGraw Hill 14  Friendship across the Life Cycle 5 Young Adulthood. According to a classic theory (Erik Erikson, 1950), young adults are in a stage in which they develop either “intimacy” or “isolation.” Quality of our teen friendships does predict how satisfying our future romances will be. These relationships help us to learn insight and understanding, empathy and care, and the management of frustration that are vital for successful romances. And after college, people 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. © McGraw Hill 15  Friendship Across the Life Cycle 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. They emphasize emotional fulfillment to a greater extent. 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. © McGraw Hill 16  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." © McGraw Hill 17  When Harry Met Sally (1989) – Movie Clip https://youtu.be/cTVafG4_CaY?si=bGW3u_jr1NXz4bOv © McGraw Hill 18  Chapter 7 Participation: Same-Sex Friendships Read the “Can Men and Women be Close Friends?” Text Box on pp. 281- 282, then answer the following three questions: Would you say the movie clip is an accurate depiction of cross-sex friendships? What kind of difficulties do cross-sex friends have when they are single? What kind of difficulties do cross-sex friends have when they are married (to other people)? Type your answer to these questions (100 words min, 250 max) and submit on Canvas. Due by this Friday at 11:59 PM. © McGraw Hill 19  Friendship Difficulties 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: In social loneliness, people are dissatisfied because they lack a social network of friends and acquaintances. In emotional loneliness, people are lonely because they lack affection and emotional support from at least one intimate relationship. © McGraw Hill 20  Friendship Difficulties 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. We will be focusing on loneliness in Friday’s Discussion. Make sure to fully read pp. 290-295 in preparation. You do not need to memorize the information, but it will be helpful to be familiar in advance. © McGraw Hill 21