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Research on close relationship really has come into its own in the last two decades. But among behavioral scientists, it sometimes seems that love (and related constructs like jealousy and hate) get all the attention. Yet, friendships are what sustain our psyches and influence our physical wellbeing. Psychologists Mahzad Hojjat and Anne Moyer have collected together the leading thinkers whose research programs focus on friendship. Representing perspectives from biological to social-cultural, childhood to the elderly, these investigators have produced some of the clearest writing in this area, and the collection itself will be exceedingly valuable both to scholars and students." - Peter Salovey, President of the University and Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology Yale University This volume elegantly brings the research community up to date on the extremely important topic of friendship, which is so central to human experience. An initially small body of existing research has recently begun to expand, with attention to widely diverse friendship types and contexts . This book does a wonderful job of pulling together this literature with a series of chapters with scholarly reviews each focusing on one of these domains, and consistently addressing what we mean by friendship and how it operates and interacts with the rest of human experience. Anyone doing research on friendship needs this book." -Arthur Aron, Research Professor, Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University; Visiting Scholar, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley