Taining well-functioning friendships: intimacy and conflict management competence. First, intimacy competence is defined by adolescents’ capabilities of disclosing their personal feelings and providing help to a distressed buddy (Buhrmester et al., 1988; Reis Shaver, 1988). Past investigation indicates that adolescents who’re much better at disclosing their feelings and supplying assistance to other folks have far more intimate friendships (Buhrmester, 1990). Second, establishing intimate friendships assumes the challenge of managing conflicts. This capacity involves refining the usage of compromise, negotiation, and mitigation with close mates, which stand in contrast to coercion and avoidance approaches seen in conflicts with siblings, non-friends, and adults (Laursen, 1996). Past study indicates that adolescents’ conflict management capabilities are associated to less conflict and discord in their friendships (Thayer, Updegraff, Delgado, 2008). Integrating past study, interpersonal competence seems to become related to empathy and friendship quality; we argued that the links involving adolescents’ empathy and friendship closeness and discord can be mediated by their intimacy and conflict management competence, respectively. Empathy, Intimacy Competence, and Friendship Closeness Disclosing personal info or vulnerabilities to a close pal posts potential risks that a single could face rejection, invalidation, or humiliation (Reis Shaver, 1988). Adolescents’ skills to accurately perceive and experience friends’ emotions and thoughts may be essential for lowering these prospective threats through the disclosure method. Similarly, it can be important for support-givers to accurately decode and identify with the feelings, thoughts, and emotions of a friend, in order for support-giving to become productive (Batson, 1991; Burleson, 2003). Research have examined associations in between empathy and prosocial behaviors such as altruism, volunteerism, caring, and self-disclosure in adolescence (Barr HigginsD’Alessandro, 2007; Carbonneau Nicol, 2002; Carlo Randall, 2001; Davis Kraus, 1991; Markstrom, Huey, Stiles, Krause, 2010; Padilla-Walker Christensen, 2011).J Adolesc. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2014 February 01.Chow et al.PageHowever, to our information, no existing research has examined the link in between empathy and intimacy competence, as defined by self-disclosure and support-giving. Additionally, even though research have examined intimacy competence and friendship excellent (e.g., Buhrmester, 1990), this line of research has however to think about empathy as a potential predictor of this hyperlink. Nevertheless, integrating previous investigation on empathy, prosocial behaviors, and friendship functioning, we argued that adolescents who had been larger in empathy would demonstrate greater intimacy competence, which would lead to closer friendships (Hypothesis 1a). Empathy, Conflict Management Competence, and Friendship Discord Study suggests that individuals higher in empathy are much more tolerant and accommodating of other folks (Davis Kraus, 1991). In the course of an interpersonal conflict, the capability to perceive and recognize with the distress of an additional individual could bring about a better understanding of the other person’s position and may possibly, for that reason, decrease the gap in between the two differing viewpoints. These qualities in turn, may perhaps PubMed ID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21185336 enable people to inhibit destructive impulses throughout conflicts and adopt much more efficient methods for solving conflicts. As an illustration, one study WAY-200070 web discovered.