Social Competence and the Congruence of Loneliness with Mutual Friends

Third through fifth graders completed questionnaires to assess loneliness, mutual friendships, and other aspects of children’s social competence. Two questions were of interest: 1) to what extent are children’s feelings of loneliness congruent with their mutual friends’ feelings of loneliness, and 2) how does the extent of loneliness congruence between friends relate to other measures of peer social competence? Children’s loneliness was positively related to the mean loneliness scores of their set of mutual friends. However, children who were lonelier than their mutual friends could be discriminated from children who were less lonely than their set of mutual friends, in that they had lower Self-Perceived Social and Global Competence, Peer Optimism, and considered less popular by peers. These findings were related to research documenting the powerful nature of personal and behavioral similarities for friendship formation and the importance of loneliness in these relationships for other indices of peer social competence