The current study examined the effect of empathy on friendship quality in the context of dyadic same-sex friendships, and how such an effect might be mediated by interpersonal competence. A special version of the actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) was used to examine this hypothesis in 146 same-sex friend dyads in 10th grade. Results showed that empathy was positively related to intimac...

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to determine the influence of dyadic friendship relationships on adolescent physical activity (PA) behavior. Unique to this study was examination of the "best friend" dyad. METHODS Participants were 268 adolescents (13-18 years of age) of both sexes (boys n = 140, girls n = 128), constituting 134 best friendship dyads; 84 were reciprocal best friends and 50 w...

Human relationships are vital for well-being, however shy individuals report lower relational quality than the non-shy. In an effort to explore how shyness affects people’s interpersonal relationships, this study focused on communication competence (as perceived by self and other) as the process by which shyness influences relational quality. Undergraduate students recruited a same-sex platonic...

INTRODUCTION Prevalence of HIV among young women in South Africa remains extremely high. Adolescent peer groups have been found to be an important influence on a range of health behaviours. The characteristics of young women's friendships might influence their sexual health and HIV risk via connections to sexual partners, norms around sexual initiation and condom use, or provision of social sup...

BACKGROUND Individual factors such as the value given to virginity and boy/ girl friend, and stigma attached to condom can strongly affect success in preventing early sexual initiation and in using condom consistently. To the best knowledge of the authors, no literature was available in Ethiopia on these issues until the time of this study. The objective of this study was to assess the value gi...

BACKGROUND Exaggerated cardiovascular reactions to psychological stress are considered a risk factor for cardiovascular morbidity. Social support may reduce such risk by attenuating cardiovascular reactivity to stress. PURPOSE To examine the effects of three independent social support variables and their interaction on cardiovascular reactivity to acute stress. The variables were stranger or ...

today, online social networks are very popular due to the possibility of creating relationships between people all over the world. these social networks with possibilities such as friend recommendation generally use local features derived from social graph structure. for friend recommendation, there are different algorithms with local and global approaches. in this paper, we proposed an algorit...

This study examined the relationship between relational quality and media use in interpersonal relationships. In addition, the impacts of other potentially important variables such as sex and relationship type of participants and their partners were explored. College student participants focused on interaction experiences with an acquaintance, friend, romantic partner, or family member. Questio...

During human evolution, men and women faced distinct adaptive problems, including pregnancy, hunting, childcare, and warfare. Due to these sex-linked adaptive problems, natural selection would have favored psychological mechanisms that oriented men and women toward forming friendships with individuals possessing characteristics valuable for solving these problems. The current study explored sex...