Mental Health Notes

Psychology Can Help Improve Your Friendships

by Alicia Sparks, NAMI Affiliation Leader on May 3rd, 2008

For about the past year, I’ve been subscribed to a newsletter from Gimundo. The Web site’s slogan is “Good News…Served Daily.” Well…it’s not exactly served daily; for the last few months I didn’t receive one newsletter and forgot that I was even subscribed to it. However, over the past week they seem to have picked up the pace a bit.

Thursday’s newsletter featured Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project and her article Eight Psychological Terms to Help You Strengthen Your Friendships.

Those eight terms are:

1. Triadic closure
2. Emotional contagion
3. The mere exposure effect
4. Fundamental attribution error
5. Warmth
6. Smiling
7. Subliminal touching
8. Situation evocation

I was quite interested in triadic closure (making friends with our friends’ friends), emotional contagion (”catching” our friends’ emotions), and the mere exposure effect (using familiarity to breed affection; however, I think it’d be ridiculous to assume familiarity wouldn’t also have the potential to breed - or feed - dislike).

And, I was especially interested in the fundamental attribution error, which looks at how “we tend to view other people’s actions as reflections of their characters” rather than pausing to consider how a particular situation may have influenced their behavior. I think we’d all do well to take a closer look the fundamental attribution error.

By the time I reached warmth and smiling, however, I was wondering when these words became psychological terms. I understand how both would help strengthen friendships, but to be grouped along with “psychological terms”?

Fortunately, subliminal touching (touching a person in a way that goes unnoticed but increases positive feelings of well-being) and situation evocation (treating a person in a way that encourages the person’s behavior, mood, etc. - Rubin summed this up as making your own weather) redeemed the article for me.

Rubin summed up the article by making a very good point: Even though many of us assume friendship should be a natural thing that requires no work (and, consequently, no understanding of these psychological terms), our everyday lives can become so hectic that sometimes it only makes sense to put effort into making and maintaining friendship.

Image: Newscom

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