New preprint on friendships and psychological well-being

We have submitted a new preprint to PsyArxiv. This is a project led by Alex Thompson and it is the first submitted paper from her PhD - yay! She would probably do a much better job at explaining the results than I do (She won the faculty of health and life sciences poster award - for explaining the findings presented here). We explored whether the relationship between the number of friendships and psychological well-being could be curvilinear in a sample of >300 older adults (65+). With a curvilinear relationship, we wanted to explore whether there is some limit to the benefit to the number of friends. Across various outcome measures relating to psychological well-being (e.g., loneliness, depression) and we consistenly found a ‘breakpoint’ at which there was no further ‘benefit’ of reporting more friends. The results are part of a larger project and very much a first, exploratory step.