This edited collection provides a state-of-the art overview of research on willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second and foreign language. In particular, it includes innovative studies seeking to demonstrate the ways in which WTC can be examined within the framework of complex dynamic systems, how the construct is related to self-assessment,…

This study, with 15 individuals having intellectual disabilities, found that each participant's social skills moderately predicted the average social stability achieved by all of his/her social network members, but poorly predicted average social stability achieved by the participant's three most stable social network members. Social network…

The Inventory of Socially Supportive Behaviors (ISSB) appears to be a satisfactory measure of social support with good reliability and some evidence of validity. To investigate the dimensionality of the ISSB through factor analytic procedures and to predict social support from social network variables, 179 college students (97 male, 82 female)…

Recent research suggesting a link between loneliness and social networks and a difference between males and females in both the quantity and quality of relationships support the view that loneliness can be predicted by gender from social network variables. In one study, two samples were used to explore gender differences. Sample 1, 97 males and 82…

Previous research on friendship selection has failed to focus on how the selection process changes with age or in differently organized environments. This review of the literature takes a life-course perspective on the selection of friends, charting research results on three aspects of the selection process: (1) the number of friends and their…

Most studies investigating the decision to seek mental health care have focused on socio-demographic differences in health utilization behavior rather than psychological variables. To evaluate three psychological explanations of help-seeking behavior, i.e., the health belief model, the socio-cultural perspective, and an ego psychological approach,…

In order to identify the relationship among social support networks, depression, life events, and student progress in medical school, 96 students completed a questionnaire. The results indicated good social support, a high number of recent life events, slight depression and a continuum of not quite passing to doing extremely well in medical…

Although social support has been operationally defined, a lack of conceptual clarity has made measurement modest and unreliable. To investigate the feasibility of measuring social support from a qualitative rather than a quantitative perspective, and to consider negative social interactions in the assessment, 130 college students were administered…