Is feeling that a friend shares your expectations about giving and receiving help linked to emotional support?

Details

The study examined established friendships among 255 Japanese adults. Each participant identified a same-gender friend living nearby and rated how similar they thought their expectations about giving and receiving help were. They also rated similarities in other moral concerns, appearance, tastes, and values.

Participants reported past help given and received when helping involved low or medium personal cost. For high-cost situations, they described how they expected to help in hypothetical scenarios rather than reporting observed behavior.

After accounting for relationship characteristics, the main analyses found an association between perceived similarity in expectations about giving and receiving help and providing low-cost emotional support. They found no clear association with medium- or high-cost helping or with receiving help. The abstract does not state the direction or size of the emotional-support association, so it does not establish whether greater perceived similarity went with more or less support.

Exploratory analyses, adjusted for testing multiple associations, also linked similarities in appearance and tastes to helping in some higher-cost contexts. These were findings about different kinds of similarity, not evidence that shared expectations about giving and receiving help were linked to higher-cost helping.

Because this was an observational study based on participants’ perceptions and reports, it cannot show that similar expectations caused helping or that the friends actually held similar views.