<p>Three studies focus on an intriguing paradox in the associations between gender, friendship quality, and loneliness, and examine whether gender differences in friendship expectations help explain why the paradox occurs. Study 1 (n = 1761 college undergraduates) documents the three elements of this paradox: (1) females reported higher levels of various positive features in their friendships than did males; (2) higher levels of positive friendship features were associated with lower levels of loneliness; and (3) males and females reported similar levels of loneliness. Consistent with this paradox, when friendship features were statistically controlled, a statistical suppression effect was found such that females reported higher levels of loneliness than did males. </p><p>Study 2 (n = 1008 young adults aged 18 to 29) replicated each of the findings from Study 1 using a revised and expanded measure that reliably assessed a broader set of distinct friendship features. In addition to measuring friendship features and loneliness, Study 2 also examined friendship satisfaction, and here too a striking suppression effect emerged. Specifically, although females reported slightly higher levels of friendship satisfaction than did males, females reported lower levels of friendship satisfaction than did males when friendship features were statistically controlled. Another noteworthy finding was that several friendship features were more strongly related to friendship satisfaction for females than they were for males, suggesting that females may be more "sensitive" to subtle variations in friendship features than are males. </p><p>Study 3 (n = 419 young adults aged 18 to 29) further replicated the suppression effects observed in Studies 1 and 2, and was designed to learn whether gender differences in friendship expectations would help explain the paradox and suppression effects. Two different facets of friendship expectations were hypothesized and assessed with newly developed, highly reliable measures of each facet. The first facet, referred to as "feature-specific friendship expectations," focused on the degree to which individuals expect a best friendship to be characterized by each of the friendship features that were assessed in Study 2. The second facet, referred to as "feature-specific friendship standards," focused on identifying where individuals "set the bar" in deciding whether or not a friend's actions have fulfilled expectations in various friendship feature domains. </p><p>Gender differences were found for both facets of friendship expectations with females generally having higher expectations for their friends than did males. The two facets were only moderately correlated, and related in distinct ways to other variables of interest. Findings indicated that higher levels of feature-specific friendship expectations were generally associated with more positive functioning in the social domain (i.e., higher levels of positive friendship features and friendship satisfaction), whereas higher levels of feature-specific friendship standards were associated with potentially more problematic functioning (i.e., more negative responses to ambiguous violations of friendship expectations). </p><p>Study 3 also tested the hypothesis that discrepancies between feature-specific friendship expectations and the quality of a person's best friendship on each of the same features are associated with loneliness and also with friendship satisfaction. Polynomial regression analysis, rather than the traditional difference score approach, was used to test this hypothesis. The discrepancy hypothesis was not supported with regard to either loneliness or friendship satisfaction; possible explanations for this finding are discussed. </p><p>Together, findings from the three studies provide evidence of the replicability of the observed paradox, identify friendship quality as a suppressor variable on gender differences in loneliness and friendship satisfaction, and provide evidence for the existence of two distinct facets of friendship expectations. Results from this dissertation suggest important directions for future research designed to better understand the linkages among gender, social cognition, and social experience in contributing to emotional well-being for young adults.</p> / Dissertation

No description available.

Using longitudinal peer and self-report data (n = 1490; 10th to 12th grade), changes in relational and overt aggression were each regressed onto social acceptance, close friendships, and their interaction. Links between social acceptance, close friendships and overt or relational aggression were dependent upon whether adolescents or their peers assessed their friendships and aggression. For both genders, peers were more likely to see adolescents with many friends and close friendships as being more overtly and relationally aggressive. In contrast, self-reports of close friendship and social acceptance were either unrelated or negatively related to peer-reported overt and relational aggression. When predicting peer-reported overt aggression, self-reported close friendships and self-reported social acceptance interacted such that males who believed they had close friendships and were socially accepted were more likely to be rated by peers as overtly aggressive. No connections between friendship and aggression were found when adolescents rated their own overt aggression and friendship / Graduate

The intent of this study was to supply more data to further potential investigations in the systematic study of the normal personality as described in previous paragraphs.

The aim of this thesis is twofold: to recapitulate the influences of friendship upon Robinson's life and to explore in depth the theme of friendship as it is revealed in the short poems and in the narratives.

Specific factors affecting young adult friendship development have been identified by the literature with little focus on which are most influential in determining friendship composition.. Hierarchical regression was used to examine such factors. Participants included 400 undergraduate Psychology students at a state university in the mid-Atlantic region. Findings indicated parental relationships were the strongest predictor of friendship quality. Parent-child bonds, conflict between parents, and emotion regulation skills best predicted levels of intimacy. Parent-child bond-especially with mother-best predicted satisfaction with friendship network as did conflict between parents. In addition, parent-child bond with mother and conflict between parents were found more important than emotion regulation skills although such skills were still found significant. Contrary to predictions life events were not significant to all outcome variables. Instead life events were found significant only to satisfaction with friendship networks. Finally, parental marital status was found significant, but minimally, only for friendship intimacy.

[pt] Como emoção e sentimento, todos sabem o significado de uma amizade. De Aristóteles aos cientistas sociais, que buscam compreendê-la sob os aspectos da Antropologia das Emoções, a relação entre as pessoas unidas por esse sentimento não parece ter sido modificada ao longo dos séculos. Com a internet, a amizade recebeu o suporte de ferramentas de comunicação mediadas pelo computador, que permitiram aos amigos manter contato com mais frequência, trocar e compartilhar, bater papo. O Facebook, uma dessas ferramentas, é um site de rede social que conecta amigos. No espaço social de interação que vem se tornando esse site, os amigos reproduzem os códigos da relação existentes fora da rede social online. Quais são esses códigos e como eles são reproduzidos no online, como no offline, são os pontos sobre os quais esta pesquisa pretende avançar. Esses tais códigos compõem a gramática da amizade, analisada aqui a partir da comunicação mediada pelo computador, através do Facebook, e pelo contexto interacional pré-existente ao surgimento desse site de rede social. / [en] As emotion and feeling, everyone knows the meaning of friendship. From Aristoteles to social scientists, seeking to understand it under the aspects of the Anthropology of Emotions, the relationship between people united by this feeling seems to have not been modified over the centuries. With the internet, friendship received the support of tools for computer-mediated communication, allowing friends to stay in touch more often, exchanging and sharing, chatting. Facebook, one of these tools, is a social network site that connect friends. In the space of social interaction this site has became, friends reproduce the codes of the relationship existing outside the social network online. What are these codes and how they are played online, as offline: these are the points on which this research intends to move forward. These codes make up the grammar of friendship, analyzed here from computer mediated communication, through Facebook, and the interactional pre-existing context to the emergence of this social networking site.

Thesis advisor: Frederick Lawrence / This dissertation aims at understanding Bernard Lonergan’s understanding of how the passion of Jesus Christ is salvific. Because salvation is of human persons in a community, a history, and a cosmos, the first part of the dissertation examines Lonergan’s cosmology with an emphasis on his anthropology. For Lonergan the cosmos is a dynamic, interrelated hierarchy governed by the processes of what he calls “emergent probability.” Within the universe of emergent probability, humanity is given the ability to direct world processes with critical intelligence, freedom, love, and cooperation with each other and with the larger world order. This ability is not totally undirected. Rather, it has a natural orientation, a desire or eros for ultimate goodness, truth, beauty, and love, i.e. for God. When made effective through an authentic, recurrent cycle of experience, questioning, understanding, judgment, decision, action, and cooperation, this human desire for God results in progress. However, when this cycle is damaged by bias, sin and its evil consequences distort the order of creation, both in human persons and in the larger environment. Over time, the effects of sin and bias produce cumulative, self-feeding patterns of destruction, or decline. In answer to this distortion, God gives humanity the gift of grace. Grace heals and elevates human persons. Through the self-gift of divine, unrestricted Love and the Incarnate Word, God works with human sensitivity, imagination, intelligence, affect, freedom, and community to produce religious, moral, and intellectual conversion, and to form the renewed, renewing community Lonergan calls “cosmopolis” and the body of Christ. Building on this cosmology and anthropology, the second part of the dissertation turns to the culmination of God’s solution to the problem of sin and evil in the suffering and death of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, on the cross at Calvary. The cross does not redeem creation by destroying its order, nor does it redeem humanity by revoking its freedom. Rather, the cross redeems the world by working with the order and freedom of creation and humanity to fulfill their natural processes and purposes. Just as from all possible world orders, God chose the order of emergent probability and human freedom, from all possible ways of redeeming that order, God chose the way of the cross. How does the cross redeem a free humanity in a world of emergent probability? For Lonergan, the best way to understand the cross is through the analogy of communication. This communication is in two parts. First, the cross is a communication, primarily, of humanity to God. Lonergan calls this part “vicarious satisfaction.” He takes the general analogy from Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus Homo?. But rather than understanding satisfaction primarily in an economic context of debt (as Anselm does), Lonergan situates it in the higher context of interpersonal psychology: Sin creates a rupture in the relationships between human persons and God, among human persons, and among all parts of creation. Christ’s vicarious satisfaction flows from a non-ruptured relationship. It expresses a perfect concord of the human and the divine, through its threefold communication of (1) a perfect knowledge and love of God and humanity, (2) a perfect knowledge and sorrow for the offense that sin is, (3) and a perfect knowledge and detestation of the evil sin causes. Conceived as a communication in the context of ruptured interpersonal relationships, Lonergan’s analogical understanding of the cross as vicarious satisfaction avoids Anselm’s understanding’s tendency to be misinterpreted as “satispassion” or “substitutionary penal atonement.” The other major part to Lonergan’s analogy of the cross as communication is called the “Law of the Cross.” While vicarious satisfaction is mainly Christ’s achievement prescinding from the cooperation of human freedom in a world of emergent probability, the Law of the Cross proposes that Christ’s crucifixion is an example and an exhortation to human persons. On the cross, Jesus wisely and lovingly transforms the evil consequences of sin into a twofold communication to humanity of a perfect human and divine (1) knowledge and love for humanity and (2) knowledge and condemnation of sin and evil. This twofold communication invites a twofold human response: the repentance of sin and a love for God and all things. This love and repentance form a reconciled relationship of God and humanity. Furthermore, when reconciled with God, a human person will tend to be moved to participate in Christ’s work by willingly taking on satisfaction for one’s own sin as well as the vicarious satisfaction for others’ sins. Such participatory vicarious activity invites still other human persons to repent and reconcile with God and other persons, and furthermore to engage in their own participatory acts of satisfaction and communication. Thus, Christ’s own work and human participation in his work are objective achievements as well as moving or inspiring examples. However, while Christ’s work and our participation are moving, their movements do not operate by necessity. Nor are the appropriate human responses of repentance, love, personal satisfaction, and vicarious satisfaction in any way forced upon human persons. Consequently, the cross as communication operates in harmony with a world of emergent probability and in cooperation with human freedom. With the cross as communication, redemption is reconciliation, a reconciliation that spreads historically and communally by human participation in the divine initiative. This is God’s solution to the problem of evil, according to Lonergan. Because God wills ultimately for human persons to be united to God and to all things by love, God wills freedom, and God allows the possibility of sin and evil. But sin and evil do not please God. Out of infinite wisdom, God did not do away with evil through power, but converted evil into a communication that preserves, works with, and fulfills the order of creation and the freedom of humanity. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: James Bernauer / Michel Foucault's account of power does not foreclose the possibility of ethics; on the contrary, it provides a inescapable framework within which ethics becomes possible. A clear elaboration of both the general features common to all kinds of power relations (Chapter One), as well as the evolution of particular modes of modern power (discipline and biopower, Chapters Two and Three) demonstrates how power relations both frame and require other, ethical relations. Foucault's articulation of these ethical possibilties (Chapter Four) follows several trajectories--some rooted in contemporary politics, others in ancient ethical practices--that begin with "bodies and pleasures," and move through the communal practice of friendship, to caring for oneself and others as a critical attitude. At the core of these interconected ethical trajectories are the interwoven concepts of critique and freedom, which give Foucault the resources to articulate a provisional but sufficient justification of ethical norms and values, thus answering his most incisive and significant critics. Foucault is thus a critical theorist whose work calls us not to despair but to hope in an ongoing struggle for the good and the just. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy.

It is well documented that friends influence adaptive behaviors (Brechwald & Prinstein, 2011). However, it remains unclear how influence manifests itself. The current study investigated the role of likeability and popularity in determining the relative influence that a child exercises on his or her friend’s prosocial behavior and academic achievement in a sample of elementary schooled children (N=679). The results suggest that more liked friends have more influence over their less liked friends’ prosocial behavior and academic achievement. Both more- and less-popular friends influenced each other’s academic achievement. Residualized analyses, however, which take into account the shared overlap between likeability and popularity, suggest that the more-liked friend continued to influence the prosocial behavior and academic achievement of the less-liked friend, whereas more-popular children had no influence over their less-popular counterparts. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection