Introduction
Why do people make friends? What do people look for in others when deciding whether to be friends with somebody? We have investigated our topic using a variety of approaches. We now aim to engage the interdisciplinary analysis of neuroscience and friendship, because in order to grasp the totality of our topic, we must understand it from various different angles.
Relating our Findings to the Neural-biological Basis of Friendship
The results from our questionnaire indicate that 70% of the respondents wanted to share ideas with people of similar interests, 13% feared being alone, and 6% admitted their objective was to seek benefits given by friendship. Despite the intentions behind the development of friendship, respondents from our questionnaire and interviews suggest people’s natural inclinations to making friends. In the longitudinal case study of Subject A, we noticed that lack of friends and insecurity about one’s social competency directly correlate with loneliness in adolescents. Friendships form one of the most proximal contexts with a critical role in mental health and social and psychological development (Güroğlu et al, 2007).
Research articles on neural correlates of friendship uses fMRI imaging techniques on the brain and discovered that among others, three regions of the brain are more strongly activated when subjects interacted with their friends than with other peers and celebrities: the amygdala and hippocampus, the nucleus accumbens, and the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex. These results might highlight the role of empathy and reward-related processes in friendship. Thus, we may have identified a potential mechanism by which friendships exert such a critical role in development and mental health (Güroğlu et al, 2007). Since hippocampus is commonly associated with memory retrieval, having a high degree of activity in both hippocampus and amygdala indicate the retrieval of salient emotional memory. This contributes to the fact that friends share more joint-experiences, which are also more emotionally charged, than they do with other peers. These brain mechanisms suggest that bonding with friends can introduce positive social development and avoidance of mental disorders like depression (Güroğlu et al, 2007).
Cognitive Psychology Processes and Friend Making
Aside from the neural mechanism underlying the making of friends, it is interesting to note that the psychological processes underlying friendship is similar to that of kinship, and only recently did scholars begin to study their differences. Social psychological considerations of close relationships traditionally failed to distinguish between kin and friends. Instead, these models generally presumed common domain general processes underlying all categories of intimacy (e.g., Clark et al., 1986 ; Clore & Byrne, 1974 ; Thibaut & Kelley, 1959 ). This phenomenon correlates with findings from our previous interviews, during which one female subject said “we share the same qualities…she can always get my point when I talk to her. She is a friend who is like a member of my family”. Although unrelated friends are genetically equivalent to strangers, several lines of reasoning suggest that close friendship may sometimes activate processes more relevant to kinship and that this may be especially true for women (Ackerman et al 2007).
In other research using methods of experimental cognitive psychology, results indicate that relative to targets with dissimilar attitudes, attitudinally similar targets were automatically linked to kinship cognitions and implicate the role of kinship processes in prosocial behavior toward unrelated strangers as well (Park & Schaller, 2004). The cognitive similarity between kin and friends suggest that homophily is indeed an accurate description of friend making. Furthermore, it has been argued that empathy is an emotional kinship cue that motivates prosocial action (Hoffman, 1981; Krebs, 1987; Preston & de Waal, 2002). Empathy indeed plays a major role in friend making, as our interviewees said “I was friendly because she came from the same hometown as me” and “we have similar types of humor, the same values, you know. And of course the same interests”. Overall, friend making evokes empathy that makes friendship cognitively similar to kinship. This phenomenon can be investigated by future research in order to understand the importance of collaboration between friends in a social environment.
Works cited:
Güroğlu, B., et al. (2007) Why are friends special? Implementing a social interaction simulation task to probe the neural correlates of friendship, Journal of Behavioural Science, 5, pp.47-76.
Jeffrey A. (2014) Applying the ideal standards model to unmet expectations andsatisfaction in friendship, Studies in Communication Sciences, 14, pp.20–28.
Park, J.H. and Schaller, M. (2005) Does attitude similarity serve as a heuristic cue for kinship? Evidence of an implicit cognitive association, Evolution and Human Behavior, 26(2), pp.158-170.
Zhang, F., et al. (2014) Friendship quality, social preference, proximity prestige, and self-perceived social competence: Interactive influences on children's loneliness, Journal of School Psychology , 52, pp.511–526.