Poster #231 - Landscapes of Liking: The Influence of Closeness and Fragile Self-Esteem on Jealousy in Interpersonal Triangles

• In Event: 2-110 - Poster Session 07
  In Poster Session: PS 07 Section - Social Relationships

Integrative Statement

Adolescents’ friendships are embedded in networks of social ties and enacted in small groups. Network context can create social skill dilemmas for children, such as avoiding jealousy over the interference of others in friendship. Researchers rarely study friendships in context and thus have overlooked an important source of friendship conflict.

The present study examined how adolescents’ closeness to a friend and their perceptions of others’ closeness to that friend influences their jealousy when the others are doing things together without them. It also explores whether the tendency to get jealous in these circumstances is a disposition of individuals (versus something idiosyncratic to that relationship)and can be predicted by the extent to which the individual has fragile self-esteem.

Participants were 300 youth ages 10 to 15 years old recruited into same-sex triads (52% female). Using a round robin design, each triad member was asked to rate their closeness to the others and how close they understood the others to be to one another.They also complete a 16-item measure of friendship contingent self-esteem and were presented with 15 hypothetical jealousy evoking situations.

Social Relations Modeling indicated that most of the variance in how negatively individuals reacted to interference in their activities with the friend was mostly due to dispositional tendencies of the individual (43%). Given the large actor effects, Multilevel Linear Mixed Modeling was used to explore how closeness to a partner and the other’s perceived closeness to that partner affected these reports and whether sex and contingent self-esteem played a moderating role in this. Compared with boys, girls were more jealous at the prospect of the other triad members doing things without them (b= .81, p= .034). Jealousy also increased with contingent self-esteem. (b= .88, p= 000). The closer a child felt toward a specific partner the more jealousy they anticipated at being left out (b= .14, p= .07). Interestingly, children reported less jealousy when they saw the other two individuals as close (b= -.21, p= .027).

Polynomial regression with 3D Surface Analysis was used to more directly explore the comparison of own versus others’ perceived closeness, controlling for sex and contingent self-esteem. The resulting surface is shown in Figure 1, which relates the level of jealousy over interference to the comparison of one’s own to the others’ closeness to a specific partner. Children expressed less jealousy when they were less close to the partner, but disparities also played a role. Jealousy was reduced when participants regarded the other member as far closer to the partner or when they were confident they were far closer. The most difficulty with jealousy surfaced when individuals considered themselves close to the partner but the third person almost equally close.

Results indicate that jealousy does not follow a simple investment model. Instead, children have sophisticated implicit rules for how tolerant they must be over friendship interference and these rules are sensitive to the parameters of the context that surrounds the relationship.

Authors

• Amber Ingram, University of Alabama
  Presenting Author

• Jeff Parker, The University of Alabama
  Non-Presenting Author