Topic 2: Friendship

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks.

The understanding of friendship in children tends to be more heavily focused on areas such as (1)___________ activities, physical proximity, and shared interests. These friendships provide opportunity (2)____________ playing and practicing self-regulation. Most children tend to describe friendship in terms of things like sharing, and children are more likely to share with someone they consider to be a friend. As children mature, they become less individualized and are more aware of others. They gain the ability to (3)_________ with their friends, and enjoy playing in groups. They also experience peer rejection as they move through the middle childhood years. Establishing good friendships at a young age (4)________________ a child to be better acclimated in society later on in their life.

Potential benefits of friendship include the opportunity to learn about empathy and problem solving. Coaching from parents can be useful in helping children to make friends. Eileen Kennedy-Moore describes three key ingredients of children’s friendship formation: (1) openness, (2) similarity, and (3) shared fun. Parents can also help children understand social guidelines they haven’t learned on their (5)____________.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship)

That’s all well and good, but if a potential new friend doesn’t see the same joyous charms in you, it’s (1)_________that anything deep and lasting will come of it. That said, there’s no telling when and where a friendship will develop. Often, they arise from a shared interest or hobby, and people are typically drawn together (2)________ they’re in the same stage of life, like new parents or retirees. People of similar backgrounds and cultures also tend to come together by bonding (3)______ shared lifelong experiences. Although most of these relationships take time to get really deep, occasionally friendship is more like a lightning (4) __________. “Sometimes you can be in a big group of new people and you catch someone’s eye and it’s like ‘boom!’ – instant friendship,” Degges-White says about an experience she’s termed the “clicking phenomenon.” “It’s kind of like that burst of ‘love at first sight,’ but it’s a friendship, not (5)_________ .”

(Source: https://people.howstuffworks.com/what-is-friendship.htm)

One thing adults, and especially parents, don’t always understand is that friendships are a key part of teenagers’ lives. As young people grow up and become more independent, the more (1) ____ to spend time out with friends. One typical problem is when parents decide to move to a new area because of work. This can be a very upsetting (2) ____ for teenagers. They are bound to feel lonely and this is likely to make them miserable, too. It may take some time for them to develop new relationships, so parents should be patient. They should also try to be (3) ____ about how much time teenagers spend with their friends. It is natural for teenagers to want to be out when they can. If they hear only criticism of their behaviour, it is likely to lead to a lot of (4) ____. Encourage teenagers to develop friendships with people they have something in common with. And remember that (5) ____ is the best policy when it comes to talking to teens on any subjects at all, including their friendships.

In “How many hours does it take to make a friend?” (2018), Jeffrey A. Hall describes the types of encounters that build a friendship.

His study found that hours of time spent together was linked with closer friendships, as was time spent enjoying leisure activities together. Specifically, he found that the chance of making a “casual friend,” as opposed to a mere acquaintance, was greater than 50 percent when people spent approximately 43 hours together within three weeks of meeting. He further found that casual friends evolve into friends at some point between 57 hours after three weeks, and 164 hours over three months. Hall’s research also demonstrated, however, that when it comes to time spent developing friendships, quality is more important than quantity. And when it comes to conversation, topics matter. When it comes to building quality relationships, the duration of conversation is not as important as the content. Meaningful conversation is the key to bonding with others.

Hall found that when it comes to developing friendships, sharing daily life through catching up and joking around promotes closeness; small talk does not. Consider the inane topics that often come up when you are trapped in an elevator with an acquaintance. Discussing the weather or speculating on how many stops you will make before finally reaching the lobby does not facilitate bonding. Nor does mere proximity. Hall found that obligatory time spent together, such as in a classroom or workplace, does not promote closeness. Friendships require an efficient use of time together. Someone who remembers the details of your life and asks questions about your family, your job, your latest vacation, etc., is much more likely on his or her way to becoming someone you consider a friend, as opposed to an acquaintance.

(source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/)

“Evidence has piled up to show that our relationships, including friendships, affect our health at a much deeper level, tweaking not just our psychology and motivation but the function and structure of our organs and cells,” writes science journalist Lydia Denworth in the book “Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond” (W.W. Norton), out now. The average American claims to have about four close friends, and the great majority of us have between two and six. Only 5 percent of those studied had more than eight, while 5 percent had no close friends.

Still, 20 percent of us call ourselves lonely — and the health implications are overwhelming. We’ve known about the fallout of loneliness since a 1988 Science paper concluded that being lonely “constitute[s] a major risk factor for health” equivalent to obesity, smoking and lack of physical exercise. According to Denworth’s research, lack of social contact in the elderly costs Medicare $6.7 billion a year.

There are purely positive relationships, which make up about half of our social networks, and then purely negative ones, which are rare. And then there are the uncomfortably ambivalent ones that land in-between — aka “frenemies.” These ambivalent bonds make up about half of our social networks, but the research on them is pretty stark: “Ambivalent relationships are bad for us,” writes Denworth. These relationships are reportedly causing levels of inflammation, aging, blood pressure and even greater artery calcification. This is true for even not so intimate relationships, such as colleagues and neighbors, too. Sadly, about 50 percent of married view their spouses ambivalently, according to Brigham Young University researchers. According to the book, it takes between 40 and 60 hours to create a casual friendship and over 200 hours to become a “best friend.”

(source: https://nypost.com/)

If you think you left the cliques behind in high school, think again. When it comes to building friendships, men are more likely to return to their clique-y roots than women, according to a recent study published in the journal PLOS One. Researchers found that, in general, men seek to join all-male cliques, clubs or teams, while women prefer a more select, one-on-one relationship with a few close female friends. “Much of male friendship is about coalition building,” said Tamas David-Barett, lead author of the research paper, and member of the experimental psychology department at the University of Oxford.

After analyzing the profile pictures of nearly 112,000 Facebook users worldwide, David-Barett and his co-authors found that men were more likely to post a profile picture showing themselves with a large group of male friends. The study notes that such pictures are “arguably an essential element of the male-male coalition competition.” Conversely, women almost never posted a large group profile picture, but tended to display a photo with only one other female friend. As the paper explained, women “appear more often to focus their social capital on only one person at a time.”

So why are men and women different in the way they make friends? One hypothesis is the difference between the male and female brain. Typically, women tend to have a larger deep limbic system than their male counterparts. The limbic system is a network of nerves in the brain connected to instinct and mood. The limbic system controls basic emotions such as happiness and fear. Because this system tends to be larger in women, females are more in touch with their feelings and have an increased ability to connect individually with others.

According to the Wall Street Journal, other research indicates that females tend to build friendships off of emotional connections and are more apt to share intimate conversations. The male friendship, however, is established by doing things together, such as watching the game or hosting a barbecue. “Female friendships are characterized as more face-to-face. Women want to share and exchange,” said Irene Levine, a friendship expert. “They want to bond. Men, however, want to do things together. They want to go to spectator sports; they want to participate in sports together. They do things that are more side-by-side.”

(source: https://www.deseret.com/)

TOPIC: FRIENDSHIP

Do you feel like your teenager is spending most of the day glued to a phone screen? You’re not too far off. A new survey from the Pew Research Center reveals the surprising ways that technology intersects with teen friendships—and the results show that 57 percent of teens have made at least one new friend online. Even more surprisingly, only 20 percent of those digital friends ever meet in person.

While teens do connect with their friends face-to-face outside of school, they spend 55 percent of their day texting with friends, and only 25 percent of teens are spending actual time with their friends on a daily basis (outside of school hallways). These new forms of communication are key in maintaining friendships day-to-day —27 percent of teens instant message their friends every day, 23 percent connect through social media every day, and 7 percent even video chat daily. Text messaging remains the main form of communication —almost half of survey respondents say it’s their chosen method of communication with their closest friend.

While girls are more likely to text with their close friends, boys are meeting new friends (and maintaining friendships) in the gaming world—89 percent play with friends they know, and 54 percent play with online-only friends. Whether they’re close with their teammates or not, online gamers say that playing makes them feel “more connected” to friends they know, or gamers they’ve never met.

When making new friends, social media has also become a major part of the teenage identity—62 percent of teens are quick to share their social media usernames when connecting with a new friend (although 80 percent still consider their phone number the best method of contact). Despite the negative consequences—21 percent of teenage users feel worse about their lives because of posts they see on social media—teens also have found support and connection through various platforms. In fact, 68 percent of teens received support during a challenging time in their lives via social media platforms.

Just as technology has become a gateway for new friendships, or a channel to stay connected with current friends, it can also make a friendship breakup more public. The study reveals that girls are more likely to block or unfriend former allies, and 68 percent of all teenage users report experiencing “drama among their friends on social media.”

(Source: https://www.realsimple.com/)

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace do not help you make more genuine close friends, according to a survey by researchers who studied how the websites are changing the nature of friendship networks. Although social networking on the internet helps people to collect hundreds or even thousands of acquaintances, the researchers believe that face to face contact is nearly always necessary to form truly close friendships.

“Although the numbers of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the actual number of close friends is approximately the same in the face to face real world,” said psychologist Will Reader, from Sheffield Hallam University. Social networking websites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace have taken off rapidly in recent years. Facebook was launched initially in 2004 for Harvard University members but has since expanded to more than 34 million users worldwide. MySpace, which was set up in 2003, has more than 200 million users and was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 2005 for $580m (£285m).

Previous research has suggested that a person’s conventional friendship group consists of around 150 people, with five very close friends but larger numbers of people whom we keep in touch with less regularly. This figure is so consistent that scientists have suggested it is determined by the cognitive constraints of keeping up with large numbers of people. But Dr. Reader and his team have found that social networking sites do allow people to stretch this figure. The team asked more than 200 people to fill in questionnaires about their online networking, asking for example how many online friends they had, how many of these were close friends and how many they had met face to face. The team found that although the sites allowed contact with hundreds of acquaintances, as with conventional friendship networks, people tend to have around five close friends. Ninety per cent of contacts whom the subjects regarded as close friends were people they had met face to face. “People see face to face contact as being absolutely imperative in forming close friendships,” added Dr. Reader. He told the British Association Festival of Science in York that social networking sites allow people to broaden their list of nodding acquaintances because staying in touch online is easy. “What social network sites can do is decrease the cost of maintaining and forming these social networks because we can post information to multiple people,” he said.

But to develop a real friendship we need to see that the other person is trustworthy, said Dr. Reader. "What we need is to be absolutely sure that a person is really going to invest in us, is really going to be there for us when we need them … It’s very easy to be deceptive on the internet."

(Source: https://www.theguardian.com/)

The human desire for companionship may feel boundless, but research suggests that our social capital is finite. Social scientists have used a number of ingenious approaches to gauge the size of people’s social networks; these have returned estimates ranging from about 250 to about 5,500 people. An undergraduate thesis from MIT focusing exclusively on Franklin D. Roosevelt, a friendly guy with an especially social job, suggested that he might have had as many as 22,500 acquaintances. Looking more specifically at friendship, a study using the exchange of Christmas cards as a proxy for closeness put the average person’s friend group at about 121 people.

However vast our networks may be, our inner circle tends to be much smaller. The average American trusts only 10 to 20 people. Moreover, that number may be shrinking: From 1985 to 2004, the average number of confidants that people reported having decreased from three to two. This is both sad and consequential, because whoever has strong social relationships tends to live longer than those who don’t.

So what should you do if your social life is lacking? Just follow the research. To begin with, don’t dismiss the humble acquaintance. Even interacting with people with whom one has weak social ties has a meaningful influence on well-being. Beyond that, building deeper friendships may be largely a matter of putting in time.

A recent study out of the University of Kansas found that it takes about 50 hours of socializing to go from acquaintance to casual friend, an additional 40 hours to become a “real” friend, and a total of 200 hours to become a close friend. If that sounds like too much effort, reviving dormant social ties can be especially rewarding. Reconnected friends can quickly recapture much of the trust they previously built, while offering each other a dash of novelty drawn from whatever they’ve been up to in the meantime. And if all else fails, you could start randomly confiding in people you don’t know that well in hopes of letting the tail wag the relational dog. The academic literature is clear: Longing for closeness and connection is pervasive. Which suggests that most of us are stumbling through the world pining for companionship that could be easily provided by the lonesome stumblers all around us.

(source: https://www.theatlantic.com/)