Self-disclosure and Sense of Security in Intimacy Friendship and Their Influence on Exploration Behaviors
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
LEE, Hsuan-You
Abstract
Friendship is an important social relation in adolescence and early adulthood. Across various stages of education, one makes friends by virtue of interaction between peers. Among a large number of friends, one could develop intimate friendships with only a few friends, to whom one tells of personal information, shares private thoughts and emotions, or seeks support and comfort. It has been shown that there are similarities between intimacy and attachment (Reis & Patrick, 1996). Intimacy process model (Reis & Shaver, 1988) suggested that self-disclosure could enhance intimacy. According to Bowlby’s attachment theory, individuals can feel sense of security from attachment figures and use it as secure base to engage in exploration behaviors. Feeney and Thrush (2010) further noted the three characteristics of secure base: availability, noninterference, and encouragement. Based on literature reviews, this study infers that an intimate friendship also contains attachment relationship, and therefore self-disclosure to an intimate friend has a positive association with sense of felt security, which would increase the tendency of exploration behaviors. Eighty-four undergraduate students (33 males, 51 females) participated in our study. Results revealed that in overall, self-disclosure was positively correlated with sense of felt security, and both could explain significantly the variation of exploration behaviors in regression analysis. In addition, while regressing exploration behaviors on self-disclosure and sense of felt security, the effect of self-disclosure was no more significant, demonstrating that sense of felt secure could be a mediator between self-disclosure and exploration behaviors. However, among the three characteristics of secure base, “availability” had the most prominent effect, “noninterference” was by contrast the weakest one. Subjects in this study were asked to recall the actual interaction experiences with a specific person, which allows the others a better understanding on the functions of self-disclosure and sense of felt security in intimate friendships.
Subjects
自我揭露
依附
探索行為
親密發展歷程模式
Type
thesis
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