Perceived Dissmilarity and Relational Self-Expansion in Close Midlife Friendships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research finds that perceived similarity in friendships is predictive of attraction and friendship satisfaction. People are often interested in forming and maintaining friendships with others who seem more similar to themselves, as it can predict greater compatibility. In contrast, according to self-expansion theory, some dissimilarity (i.e., personality, interests, or attitudes) may provide advantages to relationships by encouraging self-expansion. Relational self-expansion—the growth of a person’s self- concept through newer and broadened experiences and perspectives facilitated by another—is strongly predictive of relationship satisfaction. However, most research on the topic is limited to romantic contexts. The current study explored two competing hypotheses in the context of friendships, namely whether perceived dissimilarity predicts a) higher self-expansion and friendship satisfaction or b) lower self-expansion and friendship satisfaction. I also examined self-concept clarity—how clearly defined and stable one’s self-beliefs are—as a moderator of self-expansion, with higher scores predicted to be associated with higher self-expansion. To explore these hypotheses, midlife adults (N = 241) completed questionnaires assessing perceived general similarity, relational self-expansion, friendship satisfaction, and self-concept clarity related to their closest friendship. I conducted a moderated-mediation model to assess whether the link between perceived dissimilarity and friendship satisfaction is due in part to self-expansion, especially for people who score relatively low or high on self-concept clarity. Self-concept clarity did not moderate this association. Self-expansion was found to mediate the negative association between perceived dissimilarity and friendship satisfaction. Results suggest that perceived dissimilarity may be detrimental to friendship quality by limiting self- expansion opportunities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".