Girls feel more anger, sadness than boys when friends offend
26, Nov. ScienceDaily
Girls may be sugar and spice, but “everything nice” takes a back seat
when friends let them down.
In a Duke University study out November 22, researchers found that
pre-teen girls may not be any better at friendships than boys, despite
previous research suggesting otherwise. The findings suggest that when
more serious violations of a friendship occur, girls struggle just as
much and, in some ways, even more than boys. The girls in this study
were just as likely as boys to report that they would seek revenge
against an offending friend, verbally attack the friend and threaten to
end the friendship when their expectations were violated, such as
telling one of their secrets to other children.
The girls also reported they were more bothered by the
transgressions, felt more anger and sadness, and were more likely to
think the offense meant their friend did not care about them or was
trying to control them. The study was co-authored by Julie Paquette
MacEvoy, a former Duke doctoral student who’s now an assistant professor
at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education, and Steven Asher, a
professor in Duke’s Department of Psychology & Neuroscience. MacEvoy and
Asher showed 267 fourth- and fifth-grade children 16 hypothetical
stories in which they were asked to imagine that a friend violated a
core expectation of friendship.
These stories included a friend failing to hold up responsibilities
in a joint school project, resulting in a bad grade for both friends,
and a friend shrugging off the seriousness of another friend’s sick pet,
saying, “It’s no big deal, it’s just a pet.” For each story, the 9- to
11-year-olds from Granville County, N.C., and Providence, R.I., were
asked how they would feel if the incident really happened to them, how
they would interpret the friend’s behavior, what they would do and how
much the incident would bother them. “Previous research suggests that
girls may hold their friends to a higher standard than boys do, which
led us to think that girls might have an especially hard time coping if
one of their friends does something to disappoint them,” MacEvoy said.
Other studies have suggested that girls are better at friendships
than boys because they are more emotionally intimate in their
friendships, they help their friends more, and they more readily resolve
conflicts with their friends. Yet previous studies also found that boys’
friendships last just as long as those of girls, boys are just as
satisfied with their friendships as girls, and boys are no lonelier than
girls.
The researchers wanted to test a possible explanation for this
paradox: that girls have a particularly difficult time coping when a
friend disappoints them. “Our finding that girls would be just as
vengeful and aggressive toward their friends as the boys is particularly
interesting because past research has consistently shown boys to react
more negatively following minor conflicts with friends, such as an
argument about which game to play next,” Asher said. “It appears that
friendship transgressions and conflicts of interest may push different
buttons for boys and girls.” The study found that anger and sadness
played significant roles in how boys and girls reacted to offending
friends.
For both genders, the more strongly they felt a friend had devalued
them or was trying to control them, the more anger and sadness they
felt. The angrier they felt, the less likely they wanted to fix the
relationship. But feelings of sadness actually motivated both genders
toward reconciliation: The more sadness the children reported feeling,
the stronger their desire was to want to solve the problem and maintain
the friendship. Sadness, the authors said, can sometimes function like
“social glue” that holds relationships together.
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