Friendsight

Award-winning social scientist, Harvard Ph.D., and acclaimed author of “Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After,” Bella DePaulo turns her attention in this collection to one of the most significant and underappreciated relationships in our lives – friendship. She finds, for example, that: Two friends look at the same facial expression and interpret it the same way – if they are women. Over time, two friends can spot each other’s lies more accurately – but only if they are emotionally close. Sometimes one friend does not want the other to notice feelings of sadness or anger – then the closer friends are actually less likely to recognize that distress than the less close friends. Ordinarily, though, friends are more likely to know the truth about each other than are strangers, and that’s because friends less often lie to each other in their everyday lives. Those discoveries and more are described in the five articles in this collection. All were originally published in scholarly journals.

1. Similarities between Friends in their Understanding of Nonverbal Cues
2. Familiarity Effects in Nonverbal Understanding: Recognizing Our Own Facial Expressions and Our Friends’
3. Reading Nonverbal Cues to Emotions: The Advantages and Liabilities of Relationship Closeness
4. Everyday Lies in Close and Casual Relationships
5. The Development of Deception Detection Skill: A Longitudinal Study of Same-Sex Friends