24 Friendship Across the Life Span
Typological approaches highlight such differences in distinct types of friendship
networks (Fiori, Smith, & Antonucci, 2007; Matthews, 2000; Miche et al., 2013).
People differ in their networks and maintain either (1) relatively few long- term,
emotionally close friends, (2) larger networks with close friends and also loose
acquaintances, or (3) even social networks without friends and only family ties. The
advantage of typological approaches is that they consider multiple relationships and
their interdependencies. At the same time, typological approaches sometimes draw
artificial boundaries in actual dimensional characteristics, such as emotional close-
ness with friends. Accordingly, Wrzus, Wagner, and Neyer (2012) used a continu-
ous approach to examine relations between friendships and family relationships.
They found that people who had fewer siblings and cousins in their social network
reported more friends (and vice versa). In addition, people who felt emotionally
less close to family members felt closer to their friends. Thus, the quantity and qual-
ity of other relationships seem to be two factors contributing to the diversity in how
people maintain friendships. We return to this important point in the final section,
“Future Research Areas and Conclusions.”
In sum, friendships during young and middle adulthood are largely similar to
friendships during adolescence regarding function and the underlying psychologi-
cal dimensions. These dimensions, emotional closeness and reciprocal support,
are defining features of friendships, yet can also vary in their amount. Specifically,
friendships for the same individual can be differently close and reciprocal in sup-
port. In addition, individuals differ in their friendships in general, and maintain, for
example, few close friends, many friends and acquaintances, who are less close, or a
mix of both. Personality characteristics explain some of these individual differences
in friendships.
Friendships and Personality
People’s individual characteristics, that is, personality traits, affect many life
domains and naturally also their friendships (Ozer & Benet- Martínez, 2006).
Extraversion, agreeableness, and self- esteem most strongly affect both the num-
ber and the quality of friendships (Back, Schmukle & Egloff, 2011; Ozer & Benet-
Martínez, 2006). In addition to individual characteristics, the configuration of
friends’ personalities, that is, similar personality between friends, also influences
the quality of friendships. Next, we detail effects of personality traits on the quan-
tity and quality of friendships, and then address effects of personality similarity
on friendship formation and quality. We mainly focus on the Big Five personality
traits (e.g., extraversion, and agreeableness; McCrae & Costa, 2008) because they
are more commonly studied regarding friendships compared with other personal-
ity characteristics such as goals, values, or identity (Hooker & McAdams, 2003;
Roberts & Wood, 2006).