When empathy matters: the role of sex and empathy in close friendships
Based on prior theory and research (Ciarrochi & Heaven, 2009; Eagly & Wood, 1999), we hypothesized that the link between empathy and friendship would be moderated by sex: Girls will nominate empathic boys as friends, whereas boys will not tend to nominate empathic girls. We collected measures of empathy, friendship social support, and close friendship nominations in grade 10 across 1,970 students in 16 schools (Mage = 15.70, SD = .44; males = 993, females = 977). Multilevel models revealed that boys high in cognitive empathy attracted an average of 1.8 more girl friendship nominations than did their low empathy counterparts, whereas empathic girls did not attract a greater number of opposit…
Hope, Friends, and Subjective Well-Being: A Social Network Approach to Peer Group Contextual Effects
Research on adolescence has previously shown that factors like depression and burnout are influenced by friendship groups. Little research, however, has considered whether similar effects are present for variables such as hope and subjective well‐being. Furthermore, there is no research that considers whether the degree of hope of an adolescent's friends is associated with well‐being over the individual's level of hope. Data were collected in 2012 from a sample of 15‐year‐olds (N = 1,972; 62% Caucasian; 46% identified as Catholic; 25% had professional parents) from the East Coast of Australia. Findings suggest that individuals from the same friendship group were somewhat similar in hope and…