Does the liking gap persist over repeated interactions with an unfamiliar peer?

• In Event: Friendships and Peer Relationships in Adolescence

Abstract

Engaging with unfamiliar peers is a foundational step in friendship formation that can be difficult and anxiety provoking for some children. This may be attributable to how hard it is for people to know whether their social partner truly likes them. There is evidence demonstrating that children report liking their social partner more than they think their partner likes them back after an initial interaction (i.e., liking gap; Wolf et al., 2021). However, it is unknown whether the liking gap persists as children become more familiar with each other over repeated interactions. This is especially important to understand for highly shy children, who experience an anxious preoccupation with themselves when interacting with novel peers. We examined trajectories of the liking gap over repeated interactions with an unfamiliar peer, and how individual differences in shyness may influence these trajectories.
Children aged 9-12 years old (N = 186; 106 females, Mage = 10.71 years, SDage = 1.12) were paired with a same-sex, same-age unfamiliar peer, and the dyad engaged in unstructured and structured tasks during three online sessions (approximately two weeks apart). At the end of each session, children reported on (1) how they felt about their social partner (e.g., “How much do you like the other child?”) and (2) how they perceived their social partner felt about them (e.g., “How much do you think the other child likes you”) (Wolf et al., 2021). A liking gap score was calculated for each session by subtracting how a child perceived their partner felt about them from how the child felt about their partner. Higher liking gap scores indicated that children reported liking their partner more than they thought their partner liked them back. Additionally, at the first session, children self-reported on their temperamental shyness (Child Shyness Questionnaire; Crozier, 1995).
Latent class growth curve analyses revealed three liking gap trajectories across the three interactions as children became more familiar with each other. As shown in Figure 1, these trajectories include: a high increasing gap (10%), moderate decreasing gap (70%), and low stable gap (20%). We also found that children’s shyness positively predicted membership in the increasing gap trajectory relative to the moderate decreasing gap (p = .034) and low stable gap (p = .008). The other two classes did not differ in shyness (ps > .055).
We found evidence that, for some children, the liking gap remained relatively non-existent (i.e., low stable gap) across interactions with an unfamiliar peer. Interestingly, the gap between how much children report liking their partner and how much they think their partner likes them appeared to widen for some (i.e., high increasing gap) and narrow for others (i.e., moderate decreasing gap). This suggest that these perceptions are susceptible to change as children become more familiar with each other. For shy children, the liking gap increased across interactions, highlighting a potential socio-cognitive bias that may be related to difficulties forming friendships. It will be critical for future work to examine within-child and relational mechanisms and moderators of this bias.

Authors

• Linda Sosa-Hernandez, University of Waterloo
  Presenting Author

• Kristie Poole, Brock University

• Heather Henderson, University of Waterloo