When you are silent in the company of a person who is unsympathetic to you,
the idea that he is a bore. When you are silent in the company of someone you like, you come
to the certainty that you are the unbearable bore here.
Alain de Botton. Love experiences
Antipathy as a quality of a person is a tendency to show a steady disposition, disapproval, an unfavorable attitude towards someone, something.
The reputation of the sage was so high that many sought to rank themselves among his adherents, whether he wanted it or not. One day, he heard that four particularly unpleasant types had gone to see him, motivated by the fact that they could call themselves followers of the sage. He immediately found out about the likes and dislikes of these people. Upon arrival, they found the sage wearing a red cap, talking excessively, eating candy, and claiming to be unable to abstain from opium. They spent less than half an hour in his presence and never mentioned him again.
Antipathy, as one humorist joked, is when you, starting a conversation, think about how you will get rid of the corpse. Antipathy is an unaccountable feeling. It is not determined by a strong-willed decision, appearing like a devil from a snuffbox, unexpectedly and inexplicably. You look like a decent person, there is nothing frankly vicious in him, but you still feel hostility and irritation towards him (from his voice, smell, demeanor, body language) and either you are in a hurry to avoid communication that is painful for you, or you meet his cold, icy tone. Sometimes antipathy arises consciously. For example, a person, from the standpoint of his morality and worldview, gives a dissonant assessment of the behavior of another person and arouses in himself a conscious antipathy towards him.
Antipathy is the opposite pole of sympathy. “There is some special law of the sudden birth of sympathies,” wrote the English poet George Byron. The same is true with dislikes. The roots of antipathy are hidden in a person's ideas of what other people should be like. If there is a big roll of reality from his ideas, antipathy arises. He sees in another person the negative qualities of a personality, for example, deceit, hypocrisy, meanness, harmfulness, deceit, in a word, a long series of vices that immediately form a stable antipathetic perception of him in the mind.
Antipathy can be the result of differences in worldview, political views. In addition, a person, looking into the cellars of his memory, sometimes imposes his bad memories on another person, somewhat reminiscent of the one who caused grief and suffering in the past. There is a kind of transfer, the dumping of the bad on a suitable person. This is an associative antipathy. In this case, you need to analyze what exactly annoys you in this person and find a logical explanation for this. Often it is so comical that the associative line automatically breaks.
Antipathy is the rejection of another. A person who causes antipathy is not able to prove something, to bring it to reason. The ego of another person becomes an insurmountable barrier on the way of his words to the soul and mind. The trouble with antipathy is that no one perceives its words. Words go in one ear, run across the surface of the mind, and out the other ear. Let him give invincible arguments, explain his point of view in such a way that it would be clear to the baby, all the same - antipathy does not allow him to accept his words. The person understands that the antipath is right, but cannot accept it. Therefore, it is extremely difficult, if at all possible, to negotiate, to achieve some positive results with a person who causes antipathy.
Visually, antipathy is diagnosed by the following features: instinctive observance of large distances between interlocutors; crossed arms or legs, clasped fingers; lack of copying gestures of the interlocutor; a sullen look, frowning brows, a clenched mouth; tension in the muscles, a feeling of internal discomfort.
Antipathy is a sign of the duality of the mind, a sign of shying into extremes, in excess and redundancy of idealizations. It is skewed to one side. It does not take into account its opposite - sympathy and, thereby, accustoms the mind to negativity. The mind begins to think negatively. The human mind moves between opposites and is prone to extremes. A person often, seeing some kind of shortcoming in another, exaggerates him, makes an elephant out of a fly, creates a negative idealization. Like, he's too ugly and defective. Quasimodo is handsome in comparison. In a word, antipathy is the result of some partiality, bias. An ancient treatise says: “He who has got rid of the duality of the mind, from sympathies, dislikes, from love and hate, is on the transcendental level. From this moment begins his spiritual life. Otherwise, he will always accept some dogmatic ideas.”
A person shows sympathy for those objects that delight and please him, and feels antipathy for those objects that can be dangerous. Moreover, in antipathetic objects a person sometimes sees the cause of his troubles, sees in them the root of his problems. Nature has taken care that each beware of his opposite. In the animal kingdom one can find an abundance of antipathy. Francis Barrett writes: “The elephant trembles when he hears the grunting of pigs, and the lion when he hears the crowing of a rooster, the panther will not touch them if they are smeared with chicken fat, especially if garlic was added to it. There is also enmity between foxes and swans, bulls and jackdaws. And some birds are subject to endless dispersion, such as jackdaws and owls, kites and crows ... In the aquatic environment there is a strong antipathy between dolphins and whirlpools, mullet and pikes, cuttlefish and lobster, and the latter almost drops dead at the sight of the former, but the lobster tears sea eel".
Antipathy, as hostility, distrust or even hatred towards many people or even towards the human race as a whole, is called misanthropy. A misanthrope is an unsociable person who suffers or, on the contrary, enjoys misanthropy (misanthropy). This tendency may be the basis of life philosophy. The word became especially popular after Molière's comedy The Misanthrope. The misanthrope is characterized by contempt for human vices and weaknesses, including his own. As a well-known literary example, we can recall the wonderful story of O. Henry "One hour of a full life." There, a shopkeeper believed that a person is a walking evil, and rejoiced when he found another confirmation of this. It is an empty business to convince a misanthrope that in any person, in addition to shortcomings, there are also positive personality traits. Steady antipathy towards all people is the hallmark of a misanthrope.
Petr Kovalev 2014
If people experience and show feelings for each other, then almost always there is sympathy or antipathy.
"Sympathy" and "antipathy" are words originating from the Greek root patos (pathos), meaning feeling, experience. The prefix "sim" means connection, interaction.
Sympathy (from the Greek sympatheia - attraction, internal disposition) - a positively colored feeling associated with a positive assessment of a person and manifested in friendliness, benevolence, admiration, encouraging communication, attention, help, etc.
Usually arises on the basis of common views, values, interests, moral ideals. It can also arise as a result of a selective positive reaction to an attractive appearance, behavior, character traits of another person. In its dynamics, sympathy can reach tension, turning into a passion or strong attachment, or it can end in cooling, disappointment, turn into antipathy and hostility. In interpersonal relationships, sympathy is one of the factors for integrating people and maintaining psychological comfort.
It can be both stable and momentary feeling.
Antipathy (Greek from anti - “against”, and patos - “passion”) - a feeling of hostility, dislike or disgust, an emotional attitude of rejection of someone or something. The opposite of affection. Antipathy, like sympathy, is largely an unconscious feeling and is not determined by a volitional decision, but it can also arise consciously, as a result of a moral assessment in relation to those people, creatures or phenomena that are condemned by the system of views adopted in a given society.
Antipathy has as its source an idea of the harmfulness, danger, ugliness, inferiority of the object of antipathy, acquired by personal or hereditary experience or instilled in education. This feeling may also be based on a special excitability of the individual's nervous system (Idiosyncrasy).
The hereditary or acquired antipathy of humans and animals to certain objects often has an instinctive or reflex nature and, according to some authors, is associated with the task of self-preservation of an individual, biological species, group or ethnic group.
In psychology, antipathy, like sympathy, serves as one of the motivational regulators of interpersonal and intergroup relationships. At the same time, feelings of like and dislike can be more or less independent or even complementary, that is, they can naturally be combined in an emotional attitude towards another person (the severity of one pole with the simultaneous severity of the opposite) / Wikipedia /.
Sometimes frequent meetings with each other give rise to mutual hostility, antipathy, but, as special studies show, much more often they lead to mutual sympathy.
The emergence of sympathy or antipathy is influenced by emotional contact, appearance, personality traits, culture, material security, character traits, ability to communicate, behavioral patterns, addictions and relationships due to practical necessity.
Emotional contact can sometimes occur between complete strangers.
You can become friends with this person.
An acquaintance is a person known from previous experience, who knows, met, saw or heard about him before.
A partner is someone who makes up a company for someone or a co-owner of a company with a fixed share in the total capital.
Synonyms:
1. friend
2. co-owner, partner
A friend is a person with whom you can have fun, but nothing more. You can’t ask him for help in difficult times and you won’t ask anything from him. Friendships are based on personal sympathies, temporary interests and hobbies. Friends usually do not have common deep interests, common aspirations, common activities, in the success of which both of them would be interested. Most often, they do not have a serious interest in each other's fate. Friendly relations are supported by an exchange of opinions on a particular occasion, mutual benevolence towards each other, personal meetings, which may not be very frequent. such ties do not have a solid foundation, so friends easily part, they are replaced by others, companies either break up, then break up, then again, in whole or in part, get together (A.D. Andreeva).
Partner - a person of an organization (institution, institution) participating in the project through financial, material, technical, political or other support.
Partner love. A feeling of love and affection based on mutual attraction, respect, friendship and common concern for the feelings and interests of a partner (Cordwell M. Psychology. M .: Fair-Press, 2003, p. 220).
Partner (from lat. part - part) - a participant in negotiations, during which the partnership strategy dominates (A.Ya.Antsupov, p.303).
If we feel positive emotional contact and goodwill, mutual assistance and business cooperation, then these relations can develop into comradely, friendly ones. Such relationships make people feel that they need each other. Gradually, people develop a need for communication, a need to jointly carry out a common cause, a need not only for business, but also emotional support for each other. Based on this need, a sense of camaraderie develops - one of the noblest feelings of man.
It is comradely relations that help people unite, develop culture, science, improve life and themselves.
The basis of comradely relations is a sense of camaraderie - the experience of responsibility for a common cause, common deep interests, emotional support for participants in joint activities, the desire to provide them with all possible assistance. Companionships are quite long-term. Partnership is the initial stage, the first stage in the development of strong friendships between people.
Friendship
D. Schaeffer in his book "Children and Adolescents" writes that "children already have quite clear ideas about what qualities a friend should have. For children under 8 years old, social activity is the basis of friendship. Children perceive a friend as someone who who they like and who likes similar types of play activities.In contrast, children from 8 to 10 years old, with more developed social understanding skills, begin to perceive friends as individuals psychologically similar to them and show loyalty, kindness, cooperation, empathy and mutual assistance (Berndt, 1996).Although adolescents continue to view loyalty and common psychological traits as a friend, their concepts of friendship now focus more on mutual emotional commitment.That is, friends are considered close partners who understand strengths and are able to accept weaknesses, and seeks to share each other's innermost thoughts and feelings (Hartup, 1996).<..>It is often said that there is some kind of alchemy in close friendship and that friends are "attuned" to each other.<..>Even when working together on a school assignment, friends tend to be more cooperative, more likely to agree with each other, and spend more time on a task than acquaintances (Hartup, 1996). One of the reasons why friends' interactions can be more coherent and productive is that friends are more similar in personality traits and level of socially oriented behavior than just acquaintances (Haselager et al., 1998). Thus, contacts between friends are often characterized by a sense of reciprocity and allowable respect, and there is indeed a kind of auspicious alchemy in the contacts.
Close childhood friendships are relatively stable, often lasting over a year in preschoolers (Howes, 1998) and several years in middle childhood. However, the network of friends (the list of all the people a child can call friends) often shrinks as children become teenagers. This loss of friends may simply reflect the adolescent's growing awareness that fulfilling the duties of a friend (which now includes sharing confidential information and providing emotional support) is easier in a small circle of very close friends.
Friends play a unique role in a child's development.
Friends provide security and social support. Having just one supportive friend can go a long way in reducing the loneliness and harassment of unpopular children excluded from a larger peer group (Hodges et al., 1999). Friendships with one or more friends can provide an emotionally safe network—a kind of safety net that not only helps children deal constructively with new challenges, but can also help them cope more easily with other forms of life's stresses (such as parental divorce or rejection).<..>Strong, supportive friendships are especially important in developing social skills and building self-esteem in children from less caring, separated families; and when children from such an unsupportive family environment lose a particularly close friend, they often experience a significant decline in self-esteem (Gauze et al., 1996)/
Thus, friends are a potentially important source of security and social support, and this function of friendship becomes more important with age.
Friends as a factor in the development of social problem solving skills.
Since friendship is a pleasant and rewarding relationship that retains its value, children are very interested in resolving any conflicts in relationships with such significant partners as friends: even during the preschool period, the disagreement of friends stops much more often, without turning into more serious processing than disagreement. between just acquaintances, agreements on fair outcomes are more often reached, and the game continues after the end of the conflict (Hartup et al., 1988). In middle childhood, friends are slightly more likely than acquaintances to follow the rules (not cheat) in competitive games, and to respect the opinions, needs, and wishes of their partners, using negotiation to resolve disputes (Fonzi et al., 1997).
Friendship is a preparation for love.
Fragile friendship and revenge.
A loose friendship often turns out to be a conflict union, in which children react to disagreements more with an attempt to take revenge than with a desire to find reconciliation with a friend.
In studies of 7th and 8th grade students, it was found that children who began the school year in close and supportive friendships with others tended to show increased liking for or inclusion in school, while students whose friendships were more likely to rivalries and conflicts were noted, showed weaker attitudes towards school, often becoming less involved in school activities and more and more destructive. Thus, friendship contributes to the development of social competence and self-esteem only when characterized by closeness and support (Gauzeet al., 1996). Finally, adolescents who maintain close same-sex friendships have better first love relationships than those who do not (Connolly et al., 2000)/
Educators and psychologists should expand their exposure to unpopular at-risk children to include lessons on how to make and maintain these close bonds, just as we train them in other social skills (Rose & Asher, 1999).
Friendship is a mutual feeling. friendship requires mutual sympathy, mutual affection for each other. And no one can be forced (for example, out of a sense of duty or out of pity) to become someone else's friend. You can only make them pretend in different ways, portray friendly relations. However, they will not bring joy to anyone, because they will not have genuine feelings - closeness, openness, trust. Therefore, friendship is based on the fact that people voluntarily, freely choose each other.
Friendship is selfless. It is incompatible with relationships that exist for the sake of profit or the provision of mutual services.
the great W. Shakespeare has these lines:
True friend everywhere
Faithful, in happiness and in trouble;
Your sadness worries him
You don't sleep - he can't sleep
And in everything without distant words
He is ready to help you.
Yes, the actions are dissimilar
Faithful friend and flatterer worthless.
It is not uncommon for friendship to arise between people with completely opposite character traits. This happens because a person seeks and finds in a friend what he himself lacks. They seem to complement each other, and they are endlessly interested in being together.
Friendship is very thin and fragile. Friendship often dies because people stop trusting each other. Some actions of a friend begin to be perceived as a betrayal. Sometimes a person understands with his mind that he is wrong, that it is a trifle, but he cannot help himself. Meanwhile, friendship cannot exist without mutual trust. "Not trusting a friend," wrote the French philosopher F. de La Rochefoucauld, "is more shameful than being deceived by him."
To have a friend, you must treat the other person the way you would like him to treat you. Selfishness, hypocrisy, deceit, selfishness, betrayal are incompatible with friendship. A swaggering, lazy, uncultured, indifferent person has few friends.
True friendship is unthinkable without dedication. True friendship is strictly selective. Even Aristotle noted that "A friend to everyone is nobody's friend" [Psychology. V|. A.D. Andreeva, I.V. Dubrvina, D.V. Lubovsky, A.M. Parishioners. M.: Moscow Psychological and Social Institute. Voronezh. MODEK, 2001].
Literature:
1. Psychology. V|. A.D. Andreeva, I.V. Dubrvina, D.V. Lubovsky, A.M. Parishioners. M.: Moscow Psychological and Social Institute. Voronezh. MODEK, 2001.
2. Shaffer D. Children and adolescents. St. Petersburg: Peter, 2003.
Sympathy
Material http://www.psychologos.ru/articles/view/simpatiya
Expressions of sympathy can take unexpected forms.
Sympathy is a feeling of friendly disposition, disinterested attraction. I want to look at someone who is cute, I want to hear him, I want to be with him more often. At the same time, there is no obvious benefit from this looking, hearing and being nearby.
Unlike falling in love, sympathy is an easy and controlled feeling. Sympathy is easy to "push" and forget about it, it is difficult to do this with love.
In children and adolescents, manifestations of sympathy sometimes have unexpected, including negative forms: pull the pigtail, push, hit ...
What do you do to make people like you?
We don't always like people. People are both nasty and difficult. And sometimes you want people to like you - this makes it more pleasant to be among them yourself, and this is sometimes necessary for business. It happens that you understand with your head that a person is probably good, but there is no warm relationship in your soul, and then you want to correct your soul. What can help? What can you do to make someone like you more?
The power of sympathy
The article is based on David Myers' book "Social Psychology"
Who will we love more - the one who did not love us at first, and then fell in love, or the one who loved us from the very beginning?
Example: Sasha studies in the same group as Olya. At first, he could not get rid of the feeling that for Olya he was a so-so guy. But as time passes, he notices: Olya's opinion of him is clearly changing for the better, and in the end it turns out that she considers him a capable, attentive and charming young man. Question: would Olya Sasha have liked more if she had such a flattering opinion about him from the very beginning?
To clarify this issue, Elliot Aronson and Darwin Linder conducted an experiment: they "allowed" 80 female students to overhear how one woman spoke about them. Some students heard only flattering reviews, others only negative ones. Others heard both, but in a different sequence: either first negative, and then flattering (as in the case of Sasha), or vice versa. And in this and other experiments, the “appraiser” was better treated by those subjects who grew up in her eyes, especially if this growth was gradual and refuted the initial criticism. Perhaps Olya's praise was more credible because it followed the criticism. And another thing is possible: Olya had to wait for praise, which is why she aroused special gratitude.
Aronson believed that if you constantly praise a person, praise can depreciate. When a husband says to his wife for the 500th time, “Honey, you are simply irresistible!” His words are less impressive than if he said: “Honey, I don’t think this dress suits you very well.” Therefore, it is much easier to offend a person whom you love madly than to please. This means that relationships in which mutual respect and mutual approval are combined with honesty towards each other will be rated higher and bring more joy than relationships that have faded under the pressure of negative emotions, or those in which people are only trying to “not be stingy.” for praise." Aronson wrote:
“As relationships become closer and closer, so does the importance of authenticity - our ability to give up trying to make a good impression and start “presenting” ourselves as we really are, even if we are not at all good ... If two really love each other, their relationship will be more lasting and emotional if they can express not only positive, but also negative feelings, and not just constantly “have mercy” on each other.
Most often, communicating with different people, we act as censors of our own negative feelings. And this means that some people are deprived of feedback that could help them adjust their behavior. Living in a world of pleasant illusions, they continue to behave in ways that alienate those who, under other circumstances, could become a friend.
Friendships occur when acquaintances experience interpersonal attraction (sympathy).
Sympathy (from the Greek. sympatheia- attraction, internal disposition) is a stable positive (approving, good) attitude towards someone or something (other people, their groups, social phenomena), manifested in friendliness, benevolence, admiration, encouraging communication, attention, assistance (altruism).
The condition for the emergence of sympathy is territorial proximity. It creates the availability of contacts with another person. And this allows people to find in each other what they like, what they have in common, to show signs of attention to each other.
The reasons for the emergence of sympathy can be conscious and little conscious. The former include commonality of views, ideas, values, interests, moral ideals. To the second - external attractiveness, character traits, demeanor, etc. It is no coincidence that, according to the definition of A. G. Kovalev (1970), sympathy is a little conscious attitude or attraction of one person to another.
The phenomenon of sympathy attracted the attention of ancient Greek philosophers, in particular the Stoics, who interpreted it as a spiritual objective community of all things, by virtue of which people sympathize with each other. However, for many centuries, sympathy was essentially seen as empathy. Echoes of this view of sympathy, its mixture with empathy, can be found even now. For example, in the dictionary of socio-psychological concepts "Collective, Personality, Communication" (1987) it is said that empathy is close sympathy and that "...sometimes sympathy leads to altruistic help, and sometimes, on the contrary, it can cause the avoidance of another person as a source of disturbing and because negative emotions. We may shy away from meeting certain people, because even the mere sight of them makes us sad” (p. 96). It is clear that we are talking about the manifestation of empathy, not sympathy. Rather, in the case of avoiding a person, it is necessary to talk about antipathy towards him, but it is not at all necessary in the described case.
Determining the nature of sympathy and antipathy, the American sociologist J. Moreno (1958) put forward the hypothesis that the sources of sympathy and antipathy are innate and are the result of tele- the mysterious ability to attract people to him or repel them. People who have tele, occupy a high social status in the groups to which they belong. Thus, according to the ideas of J. Moreno, certain people have social talent, which is spontaneously invested in a person from above and manifests itself in the form of a stream of special particles of emotional energy tele, emitted by this person.
This hypothesis has been justly criticized by many psychologists, especially domestic ones, who noted that the main determining factor for sympathy or antipathy is a person's behavior in the process of interacting with other people, his moral and moral qualities, his ideological convictions. These views also have a certain overlap. F. La Rochefoucauld rightly noted that “some people repel, despite all their advantages, while others attract with all their shortcomings” (1971, p. 162). The phenomenon of attractiveness, attraction to explain the nature of sympathy is used at the present time, but instead of tele J. Moreno uses a different concept - attraction.
English word attraction translated as "attractiveness", "attraction", "attraction". In psychology, this term refers to the process and result of the formation of a positive emotional attitude (G. M. Andreeva, 2006). Attraction is the presence of a feeling, attitude towards another person and his assessment. The specificity of sympathy and antipathy is that they are not specially established by anyone, but are formed spontaneously due to a number of psychological reasons.
One of these reasons is the association of one person with another (“associative liking or antipathy”): we feel sympathy for someone who looks like a nice and friendly person whom we already know and with whom we have repeatedly communicated, receiving satisfaction from this, and vice versa , we develop an antipathy towards a person who looks like our enemy.
Although children quickly and confidently identify their preferences at an early age, the reasons why they sympathize with certain adults and shun others are still not clear. (Stevenson, 1965).
Since the mechanism of the emergence of sympathy remains largely mysterious, this creates great difficulties for teachers in raising children and creating a positive social climate in children's groups. As A. A. Royak (1974) notes, if children do not like a preschooler, it is very difficult for the educator to understand the reasons for his unpopularity and sometimes it is simply not possible to create the disposition of other children towards him. To understand the mechanisms of formation of sympathy, to some extent, it helps to identify factors that contribute to attraction. According to L. Ya. Gozman (1987), they are:
Attraction object properties;
Properties of the subject of attraction;
The ratio of the properties of the object and the subject of attraction;
Features of interaction;
Features of the situation of communication;
Cultural and social context;
Time (the dynamics of the development of relations over time).
Thus, the emergence and development of attraction, and with it sympathy, depends on the characteristics of both the object of sympathy (its attractiveness) and the sympathetic subject (his inclinations, preferences), and is determined by specific social conditions.
When, after a busy week of work, we relax near the fireplace, enjoying delicious food, drinks and music, we will most likely experience good feelings for those who are next to us at this moment. We are much less likely to develop sympathy for the person we encountered while we were having a migraine.
Experimentally, this principle of "associative sympathy" was tested by Pavel Levitsky (Lewicki, 1985). When… the students were shown photographs of two women and asked which one seemed friendlier to them, their opinions were roughly evenly divided. In another group of subjects, where the same photographs were shown after interacting with a nice and friendly experimenter who looked like the woman in the photograph, she received 6 times more votes. During the next experiment, the experimenter behaved unfriendly towards half of the subjects. When later they were required to give their questionnaires to one of the two women, almost all tried to avoid contact with the one who looked like the experimenter. (Perhaps you yourself will recall a time in your life when you reacted well or badly to a person just because he reminded you of someone.)
The fact of the existence of this phenomenon - associative sympathy or antipathy - is also confirmed by other experiments. In one study, college students rated strangers more positively if the procedure was performed in a cozy room than if it was performed in a hot, stuffy room. (Griffitt, 1970). Similar results were obtained when assessing people photographed in elegant, luxuriously furnished and softly lit living rooms and in shabby, dirty and cramped rooms. (Maslow, Mintz, 1956). And in this case, as well as in the first, the positive feelings caused by the elegant environment turned out to be transferred to the people being evaluated. William Wolster drew a very useful conclusion from these studies: “Romantic dinners, going to the theater, evenings that couples spend at home together, and vacations together never lose their significance ... If you want to save your relationship, it is important that both of them continue to associate with nice things" (Walster, 1978).
Myers D., 2004, p. 529-530.
In foreign social psychology, notes V.P. Trusov (1984), the predictive function of emotional indicators (likes - dislikes) was repeatedly found when studying political preferences, since they are less susceptible to the influence of "semantic filters" compared to cognitive and behavioral indicators. The most accurate matches with the results of a real vote for a particular candidate gave the candidate's emotional assessments.
Cohesion. Interpersonal relationships in a group affect group cohesion. On the other hand, cohesion can be used to judge interpersonal relationships in a group. According to V. N. Vasilyeva and N. A. Vasilyev (1979), in the lower grades, the cohesion of girls is higher than that of boys, but from the 5th grade, boys become more cohesive than girls (Table 14.1). The greater cohesion of men compared to women was also confirmed in student study groups: in men's groups, the cohesion coefficient was in the range of 0.28-0.53, and in women's - 0.08-0.11.
Table 14.1. Cohesion of males and females of different ages
These data indicate that girls, upon coming to school, establish positive contacts with each other faster than boys, but these contacts are less strong and are easily destroyed in the middle and senior grades. The lack of contacts between boys and girls leads to the fact that the overall cohesion in grades 1-8 was practically zero (from -0.09 to 0.16) and only in grades 9-10 increased to 0.27-0.59.
According to V. A. Goncharov (2001), the number of "outcasts" among schoolchildren in grades 7-8 is much higher among girls, although they often do not realize their position in the class. Girls are rejected because of their temperament or intelligence, and boys because of their character traits. The number of schoolchildren who received a large number of positive choices is higher for boys (41-54%) than for girls (37-42%), which confirms greater cohesion among boys than among girls.
As Ya. L. Kolominsky notes (A. A. Rean, Ya. L. Kolominsky, 1999), most often representatives of the opposite sex are chosen by those students of the lower and middle classes who occupy an unfavorable position in the system of personal relationships. So, if the "stars" chose representatives of the opposite sex in 30%, then the rejected ones - in 75%.
According to foreign authors, relations between men are characterized by greater conflict and competitiveness. (E.Aries, E.Johnson, 1983; R. Auckett et al., 1988; K Farr, 1988). The boys find out the conflicting relations between themselves by means of force, rejecting the weaker one. Conflict situations between girls are resolved on an emotional level, in disputes, boycotts. They talk more often to each other.
Attachment and friendship
Attachment is a feeling of closeness based on sympathy for someone, a mutual attraction to each other. As a result, such people prefer communication among themselves to contacts with other people.
J. Bowlby believes that attachment as such exists in both children and adults. At the same time, three types (styles) of attachment are distinguished: strong (inherent in 55% of people), with avoidance of communication (in 25% of people) and anxious-dual (in 20% of people) (Hazan, Shaver, 1994).
There are also personal (direct) and transitive (mediated) attachment, reliable and unreliable, which, in turn, manifests itself in an ambivalence-resisting, disorganized and avoidant type.
Personal affection is a person's predisposition to someone, devotion, the desire to constantly be near him, share his joys and sorrows, help him in everything, willingness to sacrifice himself for him. transitive attachment is attachment to that person, to whom, in turn, the one to whom this person aspires or sympathizes is attached. For example, I sympathize with Ivanov. Ivanov is attached to Petrov. As a result, I also feel affection for Petrov.
Reliable attachment is characterized by the constant receipt of support, help and comfort from another person. Unreliable attachment is characterized by the absence of pronounced positive signs of attachment.
Insecure attachment of the ambivalence-resistant type occurs when there is distrust in another person or unwillingness to be dependent on him and manifests itself in the fact that a person, in case of distress, seeks closeness with a person who cares about him, but at the same time resists support and comfort from this person. Both people, attached to each other, both aspire and fear close relationships at the same time.
Insecure attachment of the avoidant type arises when striving for independence or when resenting the person to whom it is attached, and manifests itself in the conscious avoidance of this person.
Insecure attachment of the disorganized type reveals itself when a person is afraid and insecure and is a combination of avoidant and ambivalence-resisting types. This type of attachment is distinguished by the absence of any stable relationship between two people attached to each other.
A special kind is a child's attachment. This phenomenon in children will be discussed in more detail in section 19.6.
Elective attachments find their most vivid embodiment in the phenomenon friendship. J. - J. Rousseau wrote that "the first feeling to which a carefully educated young man is susceptible is not love, but friendship." K. K. Platonov considers friendship as a complex moral feeling, the structure of which includes: the need to communicate with the object of friendship, reinforced by a habit that causes an emotion of satisfaction in communication; memories of joint activities with him and its results; shared experiences, past, existing and possible; emotional memory; call of Duty; fear of loss; a high (usually idealized) estimate of it.
For friendship, the key points are a high degree of selectivity and a relatively long existence of relationships in time (N. N. Obozov, 1997). The following elements of friendship are also noted: equality, mutual assistance, pleasure, trust, acceptance, spontaneity, respect, understanding and intimacy. (Davis, Todd, 1982).
If both partners in relations with each other voluntarily or involuntarily pursue only their own goals, their friendship cannot be lasting. That is why our society teaches us about mutually beneficial exchange, which Elaine Hatfield, William Wolster and Ellen Berscheid called the principle justice: the reward you and your partner get from your relationship should be proportional to what each of you puts into it (Hatfield, Walster, Berscheid, 1978). If two people receive equal rewards, then their contributions to the relationship must also be equal, otherwise it will seem unfair to one or the other. If both feel that their rewards are in line with their "assets" and the effort they put in, both perceive the situation as fair.
…Wouldn't it be cynical to believe that the roots of love and friendship lie in a mutually beneficial exchange of favors? Doesn't it happen that we help a loved one without expecting any reciprocal gratitude? This is exactly what happens: people who are in long-term relationships on an equal footing do not care about momentary compliance. Margaret Clark and Judson Mills argue that people even try to avoid any kind of counting of mutual favors. (Clark, Mills, 1984, 1986). Helping a close friend, we do not expect immediate rewards. If we are invited to dinner, we do not rush to return the invitation, so as not to create the impression that we are just "paying a social debt." True friends “feel” each other’s needs with their skin even when “payment” is basically impossible (Ckark et al., 1986, 1989). When friends understand that each of them is ready to sacrifice their own interests for the sake of the other, their mutual trust grows. (Wieselquist et al., 1999). One of the signs that a friend is turning into a close friend is that he shares your concerns even when they are not expected to. (Miller et al., 1989).
People are more satisfied with relationships that they consider equal. (Fletcher et al., 1987; Hatfield et al. 1985; Van Yperen, Buunk, 1990). Those who perceive their relationship as unequal experience discomfort: if it seems to a person that he has made a profitable deal for himself, he feels guilty, but if he feels that he “miscalculated,” he experiences constant irritation.
Myers D. 2004, p. 541-543.
Friendship begins with an acquaintance, camaraderie, or friendship. When relationships become more stable, deep, intimate, they develop into friendship. On the other hand, with friendship, intimacy does not reach the same level as with love. In addition, friendship is more rational and ritually determined by certain rules of behavior towards each other. The topics of communication are chosen such that are interesting and significant for each of the friends. In interpersonal communication, friends show special delicacy so as not to offend each other.
To be friends, one must mature morally and intellectually. Therefore, friendship appears in early adolescence, when a young person has the first problems and questions of a purely personal nature, which he cannot figure out on his own. In adults, friendships may develop with work colleagues who have similar professional interests and goals.
M. Argyle (1990) notes that friendship in the hierarchy of human values occupies a higher place than work and leisure, but inferior to marriage or family life. True, in different age groups, this ratio may vary. It is most important for young people, from adolescence to marriage. Friendship becomes highly significant again in old age, when people retire or lose loved ones. Between these ages, friendship is less important than work and family.
reasons for friendship. M. Argyle notes three reasons why friendly relations are established:
1) the need for financial assistance and information, although friends provide it to a lesser extent than family or colleagues;
2) the need for social support in the form of advice, sympathy, confidential communication (for some married women, friends are more important in this respect than husbands);
3) joint activities, common games, common interests.
I. S. Kohn (1987) lists as such reasons: needs the subject, prompting him to choose one or another partner; partner properties, stimulating interest or sympathy for him; features of the interaction process, conducive to the emergence and development of paired relationships; objective conditions such interaction (for example, belonging to a common social circle, group solidarity).
According to M. Argyle, women have closer friendships than men, they are more prone to self-disclosure and have more intimate conversations. Men are more inclined to joint activities and joint games with friends.
Criteria for choosing friends. In many works, the question is discussed: on what basis (by similarity or difference) are friends chosen. I. S. Kon (1987) believes that before solving this issue, it is necessary to clarify a number of circumstances.
First, what class of similarities are we talking about (sex, age, temperament, etc.). Second, the degree of perceived similarity (full or limited). Thirdly, the meaning and meaning of this similarity for the personality itself. Fourth, the volume, the breadth of the range of similarities. The similarity of friends may be limited to one particular characteristic, or it may manifest itself in many. The definition of similarity or dissimilarity also largely depends on how a person imagines himself and his friends and what they really are.
Numerous socio-psychological studies show that the orientation towards similarity in social attitudes clearly prevails over the orientation towards complementarity. The vast majority of people prefer to be friends with people of their age, gender, social status, education, etc. It is also desirable to have similar basic values and interests. True, when it is not about social attitudes and demographic characteristics, the results obtained are not so unambiguous.
K. Izard, when comparing the psychological traits of 30 friendly couples and randomly selected couples, found that among the former, the similarity is much greater. N. N. Obozov (1979) also found that people who are similar in personality characteristics are more likely to be friends. However, T. B. Kartseva (1981), having studied pairs of friends and foes, revealed that they are connected both by the principle of similarity and by the principle of contrast. More than half of the friends turned out to be quite closed people, about half of them had the same level of intelligence, and the other half - different; slightly more than half of the friends showed different levels of dominance and "concern - carelessness". It turned out that two sensible, cautious, prudent or timid, indecisive people are rarely friends.
Often people who are completely dissimilar in mental makeup are friends. An open and impulsive person can choose a closed and reserved person as a friend. The relationship between such friends gives each of them the maximum opportunity for self-expression with a minimum of rivalry; at the same time, together they make a couple with a greater variety of personality traits than either individually (Hartup, 1970). However, friends are rarely the exact opposite of each other. Friendship couples that have existed for a long time are usually characterized by the presence of common values, attitudes, hopes and opinions both about each other and about other people.
Indicative in this regard is the experiment that was done by the American social psychologist T. Newcomb. (Newcomb, 1961). He settled first-year students into rooms in different combinations according to the principle of similarity or dissimilarity of their social attitudes, and then studied the dynamics of their relationship. It turned out that in the early stages of dating, attraction is more dependent on spatial proximity than on the similarity of attitudes. In the future, however, the factor of similarity of attitudes became stronger than the influence of neighborhood.
Finishing the consideration of the question of the similarity and difference of friends, I will give the data of the study by D. Kendel (Kandel, 1978), who examined 1,800 friendly couples of American high school students. It turned out that the friends were very similar in their socio-demographic characteristics (social origin, gender, race, age), there were significant similarities in some aspects of behavior (especially delinquent), in interests and the degree of participation in the group life of peers. In terms of psychological characteristics (assessment of their personal qualities and relationships with parents), the similarity between friends was much less.
The emergence of friendship is facilitated by the territorial proximity of people, which creates conditions for the frequent intersection of the paths of two people. This facilitates the emergence of contacts, the constant falling of people into our field of vision and the emergence of sympathy as a result of this. As experiments show, we are predisposed to love more or feel sympathy for someone (or what) we see more often. True, everything has a limit, and frequent meetings too. Sympathy occurs when another person appears in our field of vision with moderate frequency.
The effect of "simply falling into the field of view" also affects how we evaluate others: we like familiar people (Swap, 1977). We even love ourselves more when we are the way we are used to seeing ourselves. Theodore Mita, Marshall Dermer and Geoffrey Knight (Mita, Dermer Knight, 1977) performed an admirable experiment. They took a photo of the students... and then showed each of them a real photo of her and a photo taken from the image of this photo in the mirror. When they asked the subjects which of the two photographs they preferred, the majority chose the one taken with the help of a mirror, that is, the image of their face that they are accustomed to seeing in the mirror. When both photos were shown to close friends of the subjects, they chose the “real” picture—the image they were used to seeing.
Myers D. 2004, p. 504.
Rules for the behavior of friends. M. Argyle and M. Henderson (Argyle, Henderson, 1984) by interview established general rules of conduct that are considered the most important for the continuation of friendships and the non-observance of which leads to their break. Of the 27 rules of friendship, they identified the 13 most important and divided them into four groups.
Exchange:
Share news about your successes;
Show emotional support;
Volunteer to help in case of need;
Try to make your friend feel good in your company;
Return debts and rendered services*.
Intimacy:
Confidence in another and trust in him.
Relationship with third parties:
Protect a friend in his absence;
Be tolerant of the rest of his friends*;
Do not criticize a friend in public**;
Keep trusted secrets**;
Do not be jealous or criticize other personal relationships of the other**. Coordination:
Do not be intrusive, do not teach *;
Respect the friend's inner peace and autonomy**.
The most important are the six rules that are not marked with asterisks. Rules marked with one asterisk are important for normal levels of friendship, but can be broken in especially close relationships: close friends are not considered favors, forgive intolerance towards mutual acquaintances, and even some importunity. The rules marked with two asterisks are also considered important and their violation can lead to the termination of friendship, however, the assessment of the depth of friendships does not depend on them. They are not specific to friendships, but are present in other personal relationships as well.
All these rules can be reduced to more generalized ones, namely to justice, equality, respect, ability to understand each other, readiness to always help, trust and devotion, self-disclosure. Violation of one of these rules leads to the destruction of friendly relations.
Nemov R. S., Altunina I. R., 2008, p. 95-96.
Trust in each other, understanding each other and accepting each other as communication partners lead to their self-disclosure(S. Jurard), since each of them is sure that such disclosure will not lead to the loss of the other's attachment. As partners open up, they get to know each other more and more.
The frankness of people depends on their condition (when a person is upset with something, he is more prone to frankness - Stiles et al. 1992), on whether the person intends to continue the relationship in the future (Shaffer et al., 1996), on how frank the interlocutor is with him (reciprocity effect of self-disclosure– berg, 1987; Miller, 1990) whether strong attachment styles are demonstrated. However, partners approach trusting relationships gradually, talking about themselves step by step.
Some people - especially women - have a rare gift of "confessors": they dispose to frankness even those who are usually not very inclined to "let strangers into their souls" (Miller et al., 1983; Pegalis et al., 1994; Shaffer et al. 1996). As a rule, such people know how to listen to interlocutors. During a conversation, they are attention itself and with all their appearance make it clear that they enjoy it. (Purvis et al., 1984). They may also say certain phrases from time to time, thus showing the speaker that they support him. Such people psychologist Carl Rogers (Rogers, 1980) called "developmental listeners": they are responsive and caring, able to empathize with others, sincere in expressing their own feelings, and able to understand the feelings of others.
Myers D. 2004, p. 544-545.
Children's friendship. Canadian psychologists B. Baigelow and D. La Gaipa (quoted in Cohn, 1987), studying children from 6 to 14 years old, found that friendship, in terms of normative expectations, goes through three stages of development:
1) situational relations in connection with common activities, territorial proximity, mutual assessment;
2) the contractual nature of relations - strict observance of the rules of friendship and high demands on the character of a friend;
3) "internal-psychological" stage - personal traits acquire paramount importance: fidelity, sincerity, the ability to intimacy.
R. A. Smirnova (1981) compiled a summary of those features that psychologists indicate as the basis of friendly attachments between children of different ages (Table 14.2).
Table 14.2. Peculiarities of the child, providing attachment to him peers
From the table it follows that the main factors are the personal characteristics of children, characterizing the style of communication, and the characteristics of behavior in joint activities.
According to S.P. Tishchenko (1970), in the absolute majority of cases, fifth-graders would like to be friends with popular students; in the eighth grades, this factor in the choice of friends manifested itself only in 20% of schoolchildren. At present, with the friendship of the guys, the factor of national belonging has begun to play an important role. According to D. I. Feldstein (1993), 69% of 6-7-year-old children, when choosing a friend, put this factor in the first place. In adolescents, this percentage is even higher - 84%.
In young children, friendship is unstable, situational. It can stop because of a trifle, since they do not know how to put up with the private shortcomings of their friends.
The first love not only does not weaken the need for a friend, but often strengthens it because of the need to share your experiences with him. But as soon as mutual love appears with its psychological and physical intimacy, it ceases to be discussed with friends until some difficulties arise in love relationships.
Peculiarities of friendship of rural children. Interesting information about the specifics of friendship between rural children is given on the basis of his own research by I. S. Kon. Less common among rural boys "steam room" friendship and more extensive, bringing together more than five friends. Rural schoolchildren have much more developed interclass contacts, meetings of friends often take place in public places. They are less likely to experience a lack of companionship. They have less "understanding motive" as a reason for friendship.
Those wishing to learn more about the feeling of friendship and the behavior that accompanies it may refer to the book by J. S. Cohn (1987).
Love
If you ask people what feelings they have, they can name, then the feeling of love will be named first of all. Philosophers, psychologists, physiologists devoted many pages to her in their works.
In love, pauses are especially delightful. As if in these moments tenderness accumulates, breaking through then with sweet outpourings.
V. Hugo
The word "love", like many other words (for example, "feeling"), is used very widely and not always in the same sense. B. Marstein (Murstein, 1986) writes in this regard that love represents a kind of Austro-Hungarian empire, where many rather difficultly compatible cognitive, emotional and behavioral phenomena are collected under one cap. The concept of "love" is considered as a collective for many different phenomena in the relationship between people and Kelly (Kelley, 1983).
E. Fromm (1990) writes that “hardly any word is surrounded by such ambiguity and confusion as the word “love”. It is used to refer to almost every feeling that is not associated with hatred and disgust. It includes everything from the love of ice cream to the love of a symphony, from the slightest sympathy to the deepest feeling of intimacy. People feel loved if they are "infatuated" with someone. They also call their addiction and their possessiveness love. They really believe that there is nothing easier than to love, the difficulty is only in finding a worthy object, and they attribute failure in finding happiness and love to their bad luck in choosing a worthy partner. But despite all this confusion and wishful thinking, love is a very specific feeling; and although every human being has the capacity to love, its realization is one of the most difficult tasks. True love is rooted in fruitfulness, and therefore, in fact, can be called "fruitful love." Its essence is the same, whether it is a mother's love for a child, love for people, or erotic love between two individuals. It is care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.”
Care and responsibility mean that love is an activity, not a passion that has seized someone, and not an affect that has “captured” someone (1990, pp. 82-83).
The emphasis in love on care and responsibility is necessary for E. Fromm in order to justify love for all of humanity and specifically for each person, since it is unrealistic to experience passion for everyone or emotions about each person. It is no coincidence that love for a particular person, according to Fromm, should be realized through love for people (humanity). Otherwise, as he believes, love becomes superficial and random, remains something small.
Fully agreeing that the word “love” in the ordinary sense sometimes loses its specific content (F. La Rochefoucauld, for example, well noted that “for most people, love for justice is simply a fear of being subjected to injustice” (1971, p. 156)) and that love is not an affect (if it is understood as an emotion), it is difficult to admit that Fromm is right that love is an activity manifested only in care, responsibility (I would add to them such behavioral manifestations as tenderness, affection). All this is a consequence of love, its manifestation, and not its essence. The essence remains a feeling, that is, an emotional attitude towards someone.
In love, the main thing is habit.
V. Hugo
K. Izard writes: “... There are several varieties of love, but I have a feeling that they all have something in common at their core, something that makes each of them important and significant for a person, something that runs like a red thread through all types love…” (2000, p. 411). I believe that one of the main signs of this feeling, a "red thread" passing through all types of love, judging by the data of a number of authors (Bowlby, 1973; ainsworth, 1973; Hazan, Shaver, 1997) are warmness and attachment to the object of love. Warmth is manifested in hugs, kisses, caresses, and affection - in a steady need to communicate with this person, in closeness with him. Although these two parameters of love (inherent to some extent in friendship, and especially in love) are interconnected, at the same time they function autonomously, which is associated with the presence of different neurophysiological systems for each of them.
Obviously, it is impossible to be attached to all people, therefore love is an intimate affection with great power, so great that the loss of the object of this attachment seems irreplaceable to a person, and his existence after this loss is meaningless. From this point of view, the “love” of a teacher for students, a doctor for patients is, in most cases, nothing more than a declared abstraction that reflects the manifestation of interest, empathy, respect for the individual, but not affection. After all, affection is a feeling closeness, based on devotion, sympathy for someone or something (S.I. Ozhegov, 1975).
Types of attachment affect the duration of partner relationships: with a safe type, relationships last almost twice as long (10.02 years) than with avoidant (5.97 years) and ambivalent-anxious-ambivalent (4.86 years) types (Shaver et al., 1988).
There are other extreme views on love. P. V. Simonov (1962), correctly stating that love is not an emotion and that depending on the circumstances it gives rise to different emotions, without any serious reason reduced it to a need. “Love is a kind of need, a very complex need, shaped by the influences of the social environment, ethics and worldviews of a given society,” he writes (p. 10). Not attributing love to feelings, by his assertion that “love is unlawfully classified as an emotion” (ibid.), he gives reason to believe that he excludes this feeling from the emotional sphere of a person. Of course, in the feeling of love, especially in its acute stage - falling in love, there is an attraction, which is a kind of need, but to reduce love only to the latter means to greatly simplify this phenomenon.
The question is often asked: can there be love without being in love, and is it true that “be patient - fall in love”? The reader may perhaps recall cases in which, as a person got to know him, he began to seem more attractive, and that, as time went on, his physical imperfection became less noticeable. This observation is confirmed in a number of studies. A. Gross and K. Crofton (Gross, Crofton, 1977) showed students photographs of people after reading them their flattering and unflattering descriptions. A person presented as warm, helpful and sympathetic was also perceived by students as more attractive. People with whom we have something in common also seem more attractive to us. (Beaman, Klentz, 1983).
Society >> Ethics
"Partner" №5 (152) 2010
The Secret of Likes and Dislikes
Psychology of feelings
Grigory Kalikhman (Dortmund)
I gave this title to the article not to intrigue the reader. It's just that there is some mysterious phenomenon, which consists in the fact that some people, it would seem, for no apparent reason, are attractive to us, while others are unsympathetic.
"There is some special law of the sudden birth of sympathies," wrote the English poet George Byron. However, long before the birth of Byron, the outstanding Scottish economist Adam Smith (the same one whose works were read by Eugene Onegin) tried to formulate this "law". In 1754 he published a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith begins this book by defining the feeling of sympathy and its influence on relationships between people. According to Smith, sympathy is the ability to share whatever the moods and feelings of other people are. Modern psychology calls this ability and, most importantly, willingness the word "empathy". The word "sympathy" (derived from the Greek sympatheia - attraction, disposition) means a stable approving attitude towards someone, manifested in friendliness, goodwill and other positive emotions.
About the birth of sympathy
Sometimes it even happens that a feeling of sympathy or antipathy can be very expensive. We can recall such a historical example. The "great cannibal of all times and peoples" destroyed the journalist Mikhail Koltsov, one of his most devoted paladins, and at the same time spared Ilya Ehrenburg and Boris Pasternak, whom Koltsov had slandered under torture. Apparently, they were sympathetic to Stalin. Sympathy is the simplest kind of interpersonal attraction. It doesn't touch us deeply. It can be said that this feeling is superficial. If we are disappointed in a person whom we used to sympathize with, this does not cause us much pain. We can find likable a lot of people of any gender and any age. Consequently, the feeling of sympathy does not have a pronounced sexual connotation. In many cases, sympathy causes reciprocal sympathy. If someone shows interest in us and admires our "outstanding" virtues, we, in turn, begin to sympathize with this person. And almost certainly antipathy breeds reciprocal antipathy. We can say that an unsympathetic person is one who does not show interest and sympathy for me, so good and charming.
At the initial stage of the emergence of sympathy, the most significant are the external data of a person and the manner of his behavior, then in the process of communication, his socio-psychological properties become more significant. Strange as it may seem, too high a level of positive qualities reduces attractiveness, because such a person is perceived as inaccessible and unattainable. His constant "correctness" is depressing. A significant dependence of sympathy on self-disclosure and partners' trust in each other has been established. At the same time, not only the similarity of life attitudes is very important, but also the complementarity of personal properties, as well as cooperation that does not turn into rivalry.
One of the modern novels describes how a feeling of mutual sympathy arose between two people - a boss and a subordinate, who had worked together for more than a year before: "At that moment, something changed: they had a relationship, and they both clearly felt it. Probably, something happened in their subconscious before. Or it may have arisen spontaneously. Who will understand the secrets of psychology ... "
What Science Says
If we talk about the secrets of psychology, then science tries to explain how and why a feeling of sympathy arises between two people. Some researchers have discovered that sympathy between two people can arise if they are from each other at a distance of no more than two meters. It's all to blame, you see, substances secreted by the body and called pheromones, which are very difficult to feel at a great distance. If you want - believe, if you want - check. But in the reputable newspaper Welt am Sonntag, at the end of 2008, an article was published entitled "Gentest statt Gespräch" ("Genetic test instead of talking"). The article said that scientists allegedly established that the feeling of sympathy is realized at the genetic level and, having carried out appropriate research, it is possible to establish whether two specific people will like each other or not. It was further reported that some dating and matchmaking agencies have adopted this theory and put it into practice. Apparently, there is some rational grain in these studies. As confirmation, one can cite the famous statement of Maxim Gorky. Answering the question of the writer Leonid Andreev, what makes him (Gorky) waste time on a fruitless struggle against anti-Semitism, Gorky replied: "The Jew is generally sympathetic to me, and sympathy is a biochemical phenomenon and cannot be explained."
It can be assumed that antipathy towards Jews in general (and not towards any specific Jew), which is called anti-Semitism, is also realized at the biochemical level. Based on this point of view, anti-Semitism (or, speaking generally, xenophobia) of a single person can hardly be eradicated, since its biochemical nature cannot be changed.
Jeanette Rainwater, a famous American psychotherapist, wrote about the persistence of this kind of belief (more precisely, prejudice): , failed to do."
Observing oneself, everyone can find that he likes some people, he feels indifference to others at best, and antipathy to others. At the same time, sometimes it even happens that we have never met these people, but have only seen them on TV. And if someone causes me unmotivated rejection and even irritation, then it is more than likely that I can also cause rejection in some people. And it is not at all necessary that the people to whom I am unsympathetic are bad. They are just different, and their antipathy should be endured as calmly as possible. Here it is appropriate to recall the following statement: "If not everyone can please you with your deed and art, you will have the best taste: badly liked by everyone."
From affection to love
Significantly more complex feelings, according to psychologists, are love and sexual attraction, which are far from always equivalent to each other.
In most cases, love begins with a feeling of sympathy. If the period of time from the appearance of sympathy to the birth of love is very short, then it is customary to talk about love at first sight. Stendhal in his famous treatise "On Love" wrote: "By virtue of sympathy and some other laws of our nature, love is simply the greatest happiness that can be." Reflecting on sexual attraction, Stendhal further writes: “After intimacy between two people who experience not even love, but only a feeling of sympathy, such trust arises, such ease of communication, such tender attention to each other, which will not appear even after ten years of sympathy. and enduring friendship.
Having quoted Stendhal, I thought that all this "lyricism" inherent in the 19th and to a large extent the 20th century probably no longer "works" in the 21st century, when intimate relationships between people begin at such an early age, when they have reached the physical, but by no means spiritual maturity. Anyone who watched the TV series "School" must have come to the same conclusion.
If the roots of sympathy are hidden in the subconscious, then the causes of antipathy in most cases can be subjected to critical analysis, which is what modern psychology is doing. These reasons can be different, and often mutually exclusive. Often we don’t like in another person what we don’t like in ourselves. For example, we struggle with excess weight or wrinkles. And the other person serves as a mirror that reminds us of our shortcomings. Therefore, we find such a person unsympathetic and try to avoid him.
The second of the possible reasons is just the opposite: we do not like in the other what we would like to have, but do not have. For example, a mediocre person disapproves of a talented colleague. Or someone is happy in family life, but our "weather in the house" leaves much to be desired. And we, without realizing it, experience a feeling of envy and dislike for this person, finding other explanations for this.
Another possible reason for antipathy towards someone is that he is somewhat reminiscent of our failures in past relationships with other people. Suppose a person with some specific voice modulations at one time made an unpleasant impression on us. Another person with the same modulations has little chance of liking us.
The next reason is that the other person is not like us. For example, a miser is unsympathetic to a generous person and, conversely, a miser rejects a broad nature, while in a restrained person, obsession and swagger cause disgust and rejection.
About antipathy
Antipathy, that is, dislike, distrust or even hatred towards many people or even towards the human race as a whole, is called misanthropy. The misanthrope is characterized by contempt for common human shortcomings and weaknesses, including his own. As a well-known literary example, one can recall the wonderful story of O. Henry "One hour of a full life." There, some shopkeeper believed that a person is a walking evil, and rejoiced when he found another confirmation of this. To prove to a misanthrope that life is beautiful, and man is the crown of creation, is to waste time. Psychologists have not yet established whether misanthropy is innate or acquired.
Fortunately, the vast majority of people do not have this shortcoming, and each of us should thank fate for giving us the ability to experience sympathy and happiness in love, life and people.
Sympathy (from the Greek sympatheia - attraction, internal disposition) is a stable positive (approving, good) attitude towards someone or something (other people, their groups, social phenomena), manifested in friendliness, goodwill, admiration, encouraging communication, attention, help (altruism).
The reasons for the emergence of sympathy can be conscious and little conscious. The former include commonality of views, ideas, values, interests, moral ideals. To the second - external attractiveness, character traits, demeanor, etc., i.e. attraction. It is no coincidence that, according to the definition of A. G. Kovalev (1975), sympathy is a little conscious attitude or attraction of one person to another.
The phenomenon of sympathy attracted the attention of ancient Greek philosophers, in particular the Stoics, who interpreted it as a spiritual objective community of all things, by virtue of which people sympathize with each other. However, for many centuries, sympathy was essentially seen as empathy. Echoes of this view of sympathy, its mixture with empathy, can be found even now. For example, in the dictionary of socio-psychological concepts “Collective, Personality, Communication” (1987) it is said that empathy is close to sympathy and that “...sometimes sympathy leads to altruistic help; and sometimes, on the contrary, it can cause the avoidance of another person as a source of disturbing and therefore negative emotions. We may shy away from meeting certain people, because even the mere sight of them makes us sad” (p. 96). It is clear that we are talking about the manifestation of empathy, not sympathy. Rather, in the case of avoiding a person, it is necessary to talk about antipathy towards him, but it is not at all necessary in the described case.
Determining the nature of sympathy and antipathy, the American sociologist Jacob Moreno hypothesized that the sources of sympathy and antipathy are innate and are the result of tele- the mysterious ability to attract people to him or repel them. People with tele occupy a high social status in the groups to which they belong. Thus, according to the ideas of Jacob Moreno, certain people have social talent, which is spontaneously invested in a person from above and manifests itself in the form of a stream of special particles of tele emotional energy emitted by this person.
This hypothesis has been justly criticized by many psychologists, especially domestic ones, who noted that the main determining factor for sympathy or antipathy is a person's behavior in the process of interacting with other people, his moral and moral qualities, his ideological convictions. These views also have a certain overlap. F. La Rochefoucauld rightly noted that “some people repel, despite all their advantages, while others attract with all their shortcomings” (1971, p. 162). The phenomenon of attractiveness, attractiveness, is still used to explain the nature of sympathy, but instead of tele, Jacob Moreno uses another concept - attraction.
The English word attraction is translated as "attractiveness", "attraction", "attraction". In psychology, this term refers to the process and result of the formation of a positive emotional attitude (Andreeva, 1997). Attraction is the presence of a feeling, attitude towards another person and his assessment. The specificity of sympathy and antipathy is that they are not specially established by anyone, but are formed spontaneously due to a number of psychological reasons.
Although children quickly and confidently identify their preferences at an early age, the reasons why they sympathize with certain adults and shun others are still not clear (Stevenson, 1965).
Since the mechanism of the emergence of sympathy remains largely mysterious, this creates great difficulties for teachers in raising children and creating a positive social climate in children's groups. As A. A. Royak (1974) notes, if children do not like a preschooler, it is very difficult for the educator to understand the reasons for his unpopularity and sometimes it is simply not possible to create the disposition of other children towards him.
To understand the mechanisms of formation of sympathy, to some extent, it helps to identify factors that contribute to attraction. According to L. Ya. Gozman, (1987) they are:
— properties of the object of attraction;
- properties of the subject of attraction;
- the ratio of the properties of the object and the subject of attraction;
— features of interaction;
- features of the communication situation;
— cultural and social context;
- time (the dynamics of the development of relations over time).
Thus, the emergence and development of attraction, and with it sympathy, depends on the characteristics of both the object of sympathy (its attractiveness) and the sympathizing subject (his inclinations, preferences) and is determined by specific social conditions.
In foreign social psychology, notes V.P. Trusov (1984), the predictive function of emotional indicators (likes and dislikes) was repeatedly found in the study of political preferences, since they are less susceptible to the influence of “semantic filters” compared to cognitive and behavioral indicators. The most accurate matches with the results of a real vote for a particular candidate gave the candidate's emotional assessments.
Only a few studies are devoted to a specific study of the properties of a person that cause sympathy or antipathy for him, using the example of the relationship between coaches and young athletes.
Yu. A. Kolomeytsev (1975) revealed that students, to whom coaches have sympathy (“favorites”), are similar to coaches in terms of typological features of the manifestation of the properties of the nervous system. No such similarity was found between the coaches and the “unloved ones”.
However, in the study by T. M. Simareva et al. (1979), this fact was not confirmed, although typological differences were revealed between the groups of “favorite” and “unloved” young athletes. In the former, the predominance of excitation according to the “internal” balance was much more common (Fig. 12.1), which, judging by a number of studies (Vysotskaya et al., 1974; Fetiskin, 1978; Sidorov, 1983), indicates that they have a pronounced need for motor activity. activity, greater efficiency. The former more often than the latter had a strong nervous system, which also contributes to the manifestation of high performance “through I can’t” due to patience (Ilyina, 1976). In the group of "favorites" there was also a predominance of excitation according to the "external" balance, which, in combination with the previous two typological features, indicates their greater determination and activity. Thus, “favorites” differ from “unloved ones” in such typological features that, in combination, provide a better manifestation of various volitional qualities. The latter, positively influencing the behavior of athletes in training and competition, on dedication, performance, and ultimately on sports results, cause a more positive attitude towards them from coaches.
This conclusion was also confirmed by the results of a survey of coaches who had to evaluate all the athletes they coached on a 10-point scale using the following criteria: qualities that characterize the giftedness of athletes; qualities that characterize performance; volitional qualities. It turned out that according to all these criteria, the “favorite” athletes had an advantage in the ratings (although there were cases when, according to some criterion, some “unloved” athletes were rated higher).
The dominant attitude of the coaches to the “favorite” students was even manifested in the fact that they started writing the list of their group from the “favorites”, and the “unloved” ones ended up in the last places on this list.
The emotional attitude towards a person affects the assessment of both his personality as a whole and his professional qualities. This was revealed by E. G. Edeleva in relation to the assessment of physical education teachers by schoolchildren; if the teacher was not liked and the student had a conflict relationship with him, then he was rated low as a professional, and not just as a person.
From the book of Ilyin Evgeny Pavlovich "Emotions and Feelings"
