Social Competence and the Congruence of Loneliness with Mutual Friends

Third through fifth graders completed questionnaires to assess loneliness, mutual friendships, and other aspects of children’s social competence. Two questions were of interest: 1) to what extent are children’s feelings of loneliness congruent with their mutual friends’ feelings of loneliness, and 2) how does the extent of loneliness congruence between friends relate to other measures of peer social competence? Children’s loneliness was positively related to the mean loneliness scores of their set of mutual friends. However, children who were lonelier than their mutual friends could be discriminated from children who were less lonely than their set of mutual friends, in that they had lower Self-Perceived Social and Global Competence, Peer Optimism, and considered less popular by peers. These findings were related to research documenting the powerful nature of personal and behavioral similarities for friendship formation and the importance of loneliness in these relationships for other indices of peer social competence

Adult sibling relationships with brothers and sisters with severe disabilities

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine perceptions of adult sibling relationships with a brother or sister with severe disabilities and the contexts affecting the relationships. Adult siblings without disabilities (N = 79) from 19 to 72 years of age completed an online survey with four open-ended questions about their relationship with their brother or sister with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and extensive or pervasive support needs. Inductive analysis yielded findings related to perceptions of the sibling relationship and contexts that influence the sibling relationship. Over half of the relationships were described as being close. The emotional impact of the relationships included feelings of guilt and joy, as well as frustration and stress that were often related to current caregiving and future planning responsibilities. The contextual factors influencing relationship development included several characteristics of their brother or sister with IDD related to his or her disability, as well as sibling proximity. Implications for research and practice related to sibling relationships are provided for professionals, families, and the siblings themselves

The Association Between Attachment And Conflict Resolution During Friendship Conflict Among College Students

This study is about college students\u27 attachment to friends and how conflict resolution is related to the level of attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. Studies have found low attachment anxiety and low attachment avoidance to be related to effective coping strategies and to the compromising conflict resolution style. Many studies have focused on how participants generally resolve conflict. The current study is focused on how participants have actually resolved conflict and how they believe they would resolve conflict in a hypothetical situation. Participants answered if they could think of a conflict with a friend in the past 6 months and wrote about a conflict if they answered yes and read a simulated conflict if they answered no. Participants completed an attachment measure, a conflict resolution measure, and rated how severe they experienced the conflict. Attachment anxiety was positively related to the obliging and compromising conflict resolution styles, and attachment avoidance was positively related to the avoiding conflict resolution style in the real-life conflict sample. Attachment anxiety was positively related to the obliging and avoiding conflict resolution styles, and attachment avoidance was positively related to the avoiding conflict resolution style in the simulated-conflict sample. People high in attachment anxiety are likely to please their friend for fear the friend would leave them. People high in attachment avoidance are likely to withdraw from conflict

Development and alcohol use in college age women : an exploratory study : a project based upon an independent investigation

This study explores the role of alcohol in college age women along specific developmental transitions. Alcohol use and abuse is rampant on college campuses nationwide yet most students discontinue such use with the onset of adulthood. Given this high period of use in young adults, this research attempts to clarify which areas of development that alcohol may effect and how. Thirteen women who graduated from a four year college or university within the past 5 years were interviewed regarding their alcohol use and experiences amid specific developmental processes. A structured alcohol use questionnaire assessed participants\u27 typical consumption during college years and open ended questions were used to explore their college experiences. The findings of the research revealed that respondents connected their use of alcohol with changes in their peer and romantic or sexual relationships. Alcohol was reported to enhance bonding experiences as friendships were initiated and became progressively more intimate. Similarly, participants reported that alcohol use aided to create and foster connections with sexual or romantic partners. These findings suggest the use of a harm reduction approach to drinking on college campuses, given the important developmental transitions during this life period that are often connected to alcohol use

Attentional breadth and proximity seeking in romantic attachment relationships

The present study provides first evidence that attentional breadth responses can be influenced by proximity-distance goals in adult attachment relationships. In a sample of young couples, we measured attachment differences in the breadth of attentional focus in response to attachment-related cues. Results showed that priming with a negative attachment scenario broadens attention when confronted with pictures of the attachment figure in highly avoidant men. In women, we found that attachment anxiety was associated with a more narrow attentional focus on the attachment figure, yet only at an early stage of information processing. We also found that women showed a broader attentional focus around the attachment figure when their partner was more avoidantly attached. This pattern of results reflects the underlying action of attachment strategies and provides insight into the complex and dynamic influence of attachment on attentional processing in a dyadic context

Constant connection: College students’ smartphones attachment and close relationship attachments across domains

This study aims to conceptualize the way individuals, more notably college students and emerging adults, use their smartphones, applying an attachment framework. Recently, research has shifted from using vocabulary akin to addiction, and researchers are beginning to see similarities and consistencies in how individuals relate to their phones and how attachment was originally conceptualized in the infant-mother relationship. Moreover, research is moving away from considering attachment as categorical, and is instead considering it continuous, and as varying in domains from individual to individual. This research used a new assessment tool (the YAPS) to assess college students’ attachment to phones, their important relationship attachments (ECR-RS) and their perceived relationship quality (PRQC). Research found that though many important relationship domains, notably parents, were related to smartphone attachment; however, there was no relationship between smartphone attachment and perceived relationship quality or its constructs. Future research should aim to validate the biological attachment between humans and smartphones, as well as tease out any impact smartphones and our attachments to them may have on relationships and our perception and threshold of intimacy

What the Body Stories of Girls Tell Us About Autonomy and Connection During Adolescence

This qualitative study aimed to understand what the body stories of girls who exhibit signs of disordered eating reveal about the concepts of autonomy and connection during early adolescence. The study was guided by the research question “Are the symptoms of disordered eating one of the ways the female body “talks” about the experience of disconnection during adolescence?” Informed by Relational Cultural Theory, data was collected from two focus groups of 16 adolescent girls aged 11 to 14 years. Each group met six times over a four month period. Because many aspects of lived experience cannot be expressed verbally, the mediums of painting, sculpture and photo voice were also used in the collection of data. Potential participants were identified based upon the criteria of disordered eating by an interdisciplinary team at a primary care center. Findings suggested that the younger girls were grieving the loss of childhood and were fearful of entering adolescence. In comparison, the older girls expressed anger about being forced into responsibilities and were both struggling with and adapting to cultural messages around the body and how to belong in a culture that valorizes independence. Implications extend to systems that largely fail to read these body stories accurately, such as education and medicine. These stories also tell us how little we understand about the journey between childhood and adolescence for girls whose bodies speak the messages of disconnection

Attachment Network Structures and Adult Mental Health

Close relationships are essential to the mental health and adaptation of adults. The study of close relationships and mental health has concentrated on dyadic interactions in different types of relationships, such as parents, best friends, and romantic partners. Much less attention has focused on how a network of close relationships informs mental health. This study concentrated on a network of five close relationships in relation to adult mental health outcomes. Four network metrics, which are composition (who), strength (number of attachment figures), morphology (hierarchical or nonhierarchical), and physical proximity were examined as predictors of adult mental health outcomes (i.e., depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation). Each network metric was investigated based on different age groups and attachment quality as potential moderating factors to explore whether the network structures of close relationships can be considered as a possible factor for understanding adult mental health. Participants included 930 adults (57% female) aged from 24 to 80, who first completed the Web-based Hierarchical Mapping Technique (WHMT), a diagrammatic measure of attachment network composition, strength, morphology, and physical distance. After completing the WHMT, the participants also completed a Qualtrics survey that included extensive questions on their demographics, mental health scales, and attachment relationships. Furthermore, the participants completed the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), General Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7), and the Suicide Behaviors Questionnaire-Revised (SBQ-R) to assess depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. They also completed Experiences of Close Relationships-Revised-General Short Form (ECR-R-GSF) to examine attachment quality. Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA) and Hierarchical Multiple Regression (HMR) were employed to explore how each network indicator was related to differences in the three mental health outcomes. The findings provided some confirmation that choosing different primary attachment figures were not significant to mental health outcomes in adult attachment networks. Having more attachment figure was associated with positive mental health outcomes. Contrary to study hypothesis, participants with non-hierarchical networks reported better mental health outcomes. Additionally, the amount of physical distance from close relationships did not appear to be a good predictor of mental health

Similarities and differences in self-disclosure and friendship development between fact-to-face communication and Facebook

This research identified the patterns of self-disclosure between face-to-face and Facebook friends’ interactions. A survey of 317 participants was conducted to compare the hypothesized relationships among social attraction, self-disclosure, predictability and trust in three types of relationships: recently added Facebook friend, exclusive Facebook friend, and an exclusive face-to-face friend. Data was analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM), multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), t-tests and correlations. Results indicated that individuals reporting high levels of social attraction also reported having greater self-disclosure with their latest added Facebook friend, exclusive Facebook friend and an exclusive face-to-face friend. This supports a theorem of Uncertainty Reduction Theory that states that persons disclose intimate information to individuals they like and withhold intimate information from persons whom they do not like. These individuals also reported greater predictability of their Facebook and face-to-face friends’ behavior, which supports axiom of Uncertainty Reduction Theory that as the amount of verbal communication between strangers increases, the level of uncertainty for each interactant in the relationship will decrease. The more friends talked to each other, the less uncertainty they experienced. Additional evidence that the relationship development across different friendship types (latest added Facebook friend, exclusive Facebook friend and exclusive face-to-face friend) is similar was the statistically significant relationship between the variables of self-disclosure and trust. This supports the tenets of Social Penetration Theory and previous studies that found self-disclosure to be important for the facilitation of developing mutual trust. The results of this study showed that the process of relationship development, in terms of the relationship between social attraction, self-disclosure, predictability and trust, were similar in both Facebook and face-to-face relationships. However, significant differences existed in the amount of self-disclosure and trust between Facebook friends and face-to-face friends. Although the average duration of both exclusive face-to-face friendships and exclusive Facebook friendships was six years, participants reported more self-disclosure, more predictability and trust in their face-to-face friends than with their Facebook friends. The findings about offline friendships involving more breadth and depth than online friendships seem to support “cues-filtered-out” approach

The Friendship Experiences of Academic High Achievers in Hong Kong Secondary Schools

This research thesis explores the complex, unique and contextual friendship experiences of ten exceptionally high academic achievers in mainstream Hong Kong secondary schools. The research was conducted through semi-structured interviews and the data was thematically analysed. Three broad themes were found and presented in the thesis. They include friendship needs, friendship processes and contextual factors of high academic achievers in school friendship development. The findings show the complex and unique experiences of these individual students who shared similar academic qualities. The thesis also includes suggestions for professional practice and further directions for inquiry on gifted education and students' school friendship development in Hong Kong