Psychology of Friendship - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0190222026 ISBN 13: 9780190222024

Publisher: OXFORD UNIV PR, 2016

Synopsis

In the late 20th and 21st centuries, the meteoric rise of countless social media platforms and mobile applications have illuminated the profound need friendship and connection have in all of our lives; and yet, very few scholarly volumes have focused on this unique and important bond during this new era of relating to one another.

Exploring such topics as friendship and social media, friendship with current and past romantic partners, co-workers, mentors, and even pets, editors Mahzad Hojjat and Anne Moyer lead an expert group of global contributors as they each explore how friendship factors within our lives today.

What does it mean to be a friend? What roles do friendships play in our own development? How do we befriend those across the race, ethnicity, gender, and orientation spectrums? What happens when a friendship turns sour? What is the effect of friendship - good and bad - on our mental health? Providing a much needed update to the field of interpersonal relations, The Psychology of Friendship serves as a field guide for readers as they shed traditional definitions of friendship in favor of contemporary contexts and connections.

About this title

Review

Research on close relationship really has come into its own in the last two decades. But among behavioral scientists, it sometimes seems that love (and related constructs like jealousy and hate) get all the attention. Yet, friendships are what sustain our psyches and influence our physical wellbeing. Psychologists Mahzad Hojjat and Anne Moyer have collected together the leading thinkers whose research programs focus on friendship. Representing perspectives from biological to social-cultural, childhood to the elderly, these investigators have produced some of the clearest writing in this area, and the collection itself will be exceedingly valuable both to scholars and students." - Peter Salovey, President of the University and Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology Yale University

This volume elegantly brings the research community up to date on the extremely important topic of friendship, which is so central to human experience. An initially small body of existing research has recently begun to expand, with attention to widely diverse friendship types and contexts . This book does a wonderful job of pulling together this literature with a series of chapters with scholarly reviews each focusing on one of these domains, and consistently addressing what we mean by friendship and how it operates and interacts with the rest of human experience. Anyone doing research on friendship needs this book." -Arthur Aron, Research Professor, Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University; Visiting Scholar, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley

About the Author

Mahzad Hojjat is a social psychologist and Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Dr. Hojjat has taught, researched, and written about close relationships for the last 20 years. Her research focuses on a variety of topics including resilience, satisfaction, betrayal, and forgiveness in friendships and romantic relationships. Anne Moyer has been a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University since 2001. Her research interests include psychosocial issues surrounding cancer and cancer risk, medical decision making, research synthesis and meta-analysis and the psychology of research participation. She and co-editor, Mahzad Hojjat, became friends and collaborators while in graduate school together.

Edition details

• Publisher: OXFORD UNIV PR
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0190222026
• ISBN 13: 9780190222024
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 340
• Editor: Hojjat Mahzad, Moyer Anne