There's a whole bunch of research now which suggests that friendship is good for your health. A New York Times feature gathers some of it together.

Apparently, friendship lengthens life, is good for the brain, reduces heart disease, keeps colds at bay, helps keep your weight down (as long as your friends are slim too), and brings healing when things do go wrong.

This might all only be expected. After all, we are (a) social animals, (b) psycho-somatic creatures, (c) made through the lives of others in ways we scarcely realise. Put that all together, and it is perhaps only to be expected that friendship is correlated to physical wellbeing, alongside the psychological and spiritual.

That said, it is far from clear whether friendship is the cause, effect or just a correlate - which is to ask, whether friendship directly promotes health (perhaps by reducing stress), or whether being ill rather promotes friendship (because we then turn to others), or whether having good social skills means that you are also likely to have the skills required to access health services (such as not being embarrassed about seeking help).

And there is perhaps a warning in all this too. Studies like these tend to treat friendship as a utility, as if you should have a little friendship in your life because of the benefits it delivers you. But, of course, friendship doesn't work like that. Best friends serve no function; they are their own delight. You need to get it the right way round, lest using your friends you lose your friends - and your health plummets as a result.

It is giving that you receive. So, paradoxically, the best advice is entirely to forget the health benefits friendship might bring to you, and instead be a great friend to others.

A psychologist is warning that too much social networking, which cuts out face-to-face human contact, is bad for your health. The suggestion is that social isolation substantially effects the functioning of the body, leading to cancers, strokes, and dementia.

In Biologist magazine, Aric Sigman picks up on other research which shows we are spending more and more time alone. Individuals have fewer people in their lives with whom they can, say, talk seriously. And guess what? It is not good for us.

'When we are 'really' with people different things happen,' he said, talking to the BBC. 'Much of it isn't understood, but there does seem to be a difference between 'real presence' and the virtual variety.'

No doubt it is very difficult to unpick which elements of a life spent on facebook or twitter contribute to bad health. Is it just the lack of unmediated contact? Surely, the sedentary lifestyle it entails is going to play a major part too. And it seems likely that the success of online social networking is as much a product of that sedentary lifestyle as a cause of it. What Sigman seems to be pointing to is that face-to-face contact involves all sorts of tiny, perhaps unmeasurable, physiological and psychological exchanges that contribute to wellbeing.

It can hardly be surprising that the virtual is, well, virtual. Aristotle, for whom the fact that we are 'social animals' was a first principle of his philosophy, had a nice way of putting it: 'People cannot know each other till they have 'eaten salt together''. Truly knowing each other is the fundamental value of friendship.

As for the importance of real presence: George Steiner wrote a whole book with that title, stressing the need for authentic communication, the freedom that comes with giving and reception, and keeping open the possibility of the transcendent - that which lies 'outside of empirical seizure or proof'. Only then can we feel at home and find some meaning.

UPDATE: The magazine have put the article online for free now. It has to be said there's no direct research cited relating to social networking sites, just extrapolations from other papers.

An interesting piece of research here, grappling with the slippery question of young people online, and how that activity builds friendships, or not.

The 800 teenagers investigated engage with each other in their many hours online in roughly two ways: 'friendship-driven' and 'interest-driven'. I read the report looking for any light shone on the nature of the friendship-driven activity.

• Hanging out is a key friendship-driven activity. That's good for friendship since its not instrumentally driven: it makes for affection based on knowing someone for who they are in themselves.
• There is an element of risk in these engagements, important for friendship too, since 'through trial and error, youth add new media skills to their repertoire, such as how to create a video or customize games or their MySpace page'.
• Also, the online activity seems mostly driven by offline reality: 'Youth are almost always associating with people they already know in their offline lives.' Face-to-face time is a must for good friendship so that's the right way round for the 'on/off' relationship.

• That said, customizing games and home pages doesn't seem that deep, though I suppose you could make the same accusation against blogs.
• Also the emphasis seems to be in 'expanding social worlds': does that mean that quantity matters more than quality?
• Plus there is a self-interested driver: teenagers are interested in 'connecting with others who can help them' - though I guess that must mean they are helping others too.

Ten percent of the population are vulnerable to 'friendship addition', as a result of using sites like Facebook, according to Priory addict expert, David Smallwood. He says:

'Acquisition of friends is like any other fix but it's competitive. You judge yourself by how many friends you have online. You go out of your way to amass friends and that means people bend out of shape and become something they are not.'

'To appear successful, you go and put yourself in credit card debt by buying clothes and handbags. I see patients who are on Facebook and my response is 'get yourself off it'.'

'If you're an addict you need to do things to fix yourself and make yourself feel better. People in recovery look for ways of being 'fixed' and these websites can act the same way.'

His thoughts come on the back of published research. The fundamental problem seems to be the tendency when communicating with computers to form determining relationships with the virtual machine that online 'friends' just feed, rather than with the real people on the other end.

Or then again, maybe the whole idea of addiction and the internet is just a product of a generational panic reacting to the emergence of virtual life.

In my first year as an undergraduate, I shared a large room. I've always assumed that whoever it was whose business it was to allocate freshers accommodation, put us together on the top floor of the Houghton Building simply because we both had ginger hair. However, it was a fortuitous decision. We are now, still very good friends.

Or is 'fortuitous' the right word? Maybe I would have had a fair chance of becoming good friends with whoever I shared a first year, college room.

New research suggests as much. Rather than picking our friends based on intentional choice and common values and interests, maybe our friendships are based on more superficial factors like chance encounters. Another case in point might be those with whom you become friends at work.

Three psychologists of the University of Leipzig - Mitja Back, Stefan Schmukle, and Boris Egloff - sought to test the notion that random proximity and random group assignment at zero acquaintance would foster friendship in the long run. The researchers investigated 54 college freshmen upon encountering one another for the first time at the beginning of a one-off introductory session and randomly assigned them a seat number in a group of chairs organized in rows.

As reported in a recent issue of Psychological Science:

sitting in neighboring seats as a result of randomly assigned seat numbers when meeting for the first time led to higher ratings of friendship intensity one year later. The same was true even if participants were merely in the same row.

The finding suggests that friendships may not be as deliberate we think. 'In a nutshell,' write the authors, 'people may become friends simply because they drew the right random number.' To put it another way, perhaps Peter Ustinov was right: 'Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who get their first.'

There is clearly a truth behind this work, namely that friendship is created out of the individuals we meet. You might say friendship is an emergent property, a necessary requirement for which is meeting other people - necessary but not sufficient. It is possible that I would not have got on with the individual with whom I shared a room. Indeed, we might have seriously fallen out - as did happen with two others I knew from my year.

What is not clear from the research, though, is the extent to which it really undermines the other factors necessary for friendship, like common values and interests. For one thing, a group of freshmen is pretty self-selecting: when set against the population as a whole, you are likely to have much in common with those with whom you go to university. Dr Black tells me there was no control group: 'There was no comparison between two independent groups of people - all were of one age-group of psychology students.'

Further, the main interest of new undergraduates is precisely the making friends - which implies intention: deliberately working to find those commonalities upon which to build relationships. As is also sometimes said, you spend your first year at college making friends, and the rest of your time shedding them.

Asking Dr Black about this too, he replied: 'These random factors at initial meetings can only play a role in a context in which people may become friends. Within such a context these chance factors influence relationships between people - e.g. people arbitrarily nearby when first meeting are more likely to become friends in comparison to people in the same context not being nearby.'

But this flags up another issue: it is unclear just what 'higher ratings of friendship intensity' means. If I meet someone at, say, a conference and then bump into them at another conference a year later, I am likely to show a friendliness to them that I wouldn't a new stranger (in my case, as long as I remember meeting them, that is.) But such friendliness would be far off what might be called good friendship, let alone best friends or soulmates, though that would also constitute a 'high friendship intensity rating'.

In other words, there is a contradiction in Sir Peter's words - which is why his comment raises a chuckle. For of the people who 'get there first are' are going to be the people who 'you like best', or not: there can be no people you like best unless they have first got there! Rather, and more darkly, I suspect that what he was saying is that he was dissatisfied with the friendships he had. But that is an entirely different question.

Facebook has admitted that researchers can exploit the social networking site as a source of interacting guinea-pigs without telling users, according to the New York Times. The number of people using such sites, and the information trail they leave in their wake, is just too good to be ignored by social scientists. For perhaps the first time, they are able to ask empirically whether, say, taste determines friends or friends taste, how people select romantic partners, or whether there is such a thing as 'triadic closure' - the extent to which friends of friends become friends. But privacy rules governing how researchers may use people's personal data are unclear online. If you don't check strong privacy options, you could be being watched.

(Incidentally, a friend of mine has the witty tic of calling Facebook 'facepack' - 'Have you used facepack today', and so on. Maybe you have to be there.)

The work is only in its early stages, so results are preliminary:

S. Shyam Sundar, a professor and founder of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, has led students in several Facebook studies exploring identity. One involved the creation of mock Facebook profiles. Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure.

In “The Benefits of Facebook ‘Friends,’” a paper this year in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, and colleagues found that Facebook use could have a positive impact on students’ well-being.

Sounds slightly like the work of the university of the blindingly obvious, though another of Ellison's papers showed that hours on Facebook bore no relation to achievement in grades.

A more interesting concept is that of 'weak ties', the casual friendships that people form, and in which social networking sites excel. Weak ties have the benefit of newness and are key for people seeking freedom from established family and friends, should they be considered oppressive. On the other hand, weak ties must turn into strong ties if those new friendships are to provide long term well-being.

There are other worries about modeling human behaviour on such sites. For one thing, it reduces human interaction to the exchange of information. A romantic relationship is to post intimate data: out with the kiss, in with the keystroke. (Of course, the romantic relationship will probably exist primarily in the real world, but the research is blind to that.)

When it comes to the study of human interaction, there are self-selecting effects on social networking sites too: White, Asian and Asian-American individuals are far more likely to use Facebook than MySpace in the US, say.

But the wealth of data is too good to ignore; science loves the light of information, will rush to it, and then try and accommodate the shadows, when it sees them.

Friendship is good for your health and the health of the nation. It sounds like stating the blindingly obvious. But in the age of the autonomous ego perhaps the obvious is not always so.

'Mounting evidence from sociologists, psychologists and medical researchers suggests that strong social support ??" I like the term connectedness ??" can help a person live longer,' says Edward T. Creagan of the Mayo Clinic and the author of How Not to Be My Patient.

'It is clear that support from family and friends enhance the probability of successful medical treatment of many serious illnesses,' continues Frank C. Mezzadri. 'Depression can also be less likely with any relationship and the support that results from close ties can also diminish the probability of depression and enhance better outcomes.'

If it sounds a bit obvious, it sounds a bit cheesey too. But there are hard facts to hand.

The Children’s Society has put friendship as number two on its list of concerns for its Good Childhood Inquiry because children say it is so important:

• According to the World Health Organization: ‘Being liked and accepted by peers’ is ‘crucial to young people’s health and development.’

This year, the Mental Health Foundation’s Action Week was focused on friendship because amity has a positive impact upon people’s wellbeing. According to research from the Foundation:

• two thirds of people with mental health problems reported that it helped to have friends around;
• one in three commented that they received more help from their friends than their GP or family;
• almost two out of three respondents said that their friends handled it well and a quarter declared it made their friendship stronger.

Work has ambivalent effects on wellbeing - for all that there may be more flexibility in office working hours - and this is manifest in strains on friendship:

• The 2007 British Social Attitudes survey reports that 77% of full-time women and 67% of full-time men would like to be able to spend more time with friends. These figures are worse than those in 1989, when only 62% of women and 49% of men said so.

The same British Social Attitudes survey supports the notion that a proper understanding of friendship is vital in a tolerant pluralism:

• Nearly half of those who discuss politics with friends who support a political party that they themselves oppose, have high levels of respect for those who think differently. This compares with just over a quarter of people who only talk about politics with friends who agree with them.
• Talking about disagreements is always better than not talking at all: only 19% of people who never discuss politics with friends have a high level of respect for those who differ from them in their beliefs.

You can do far more than just by with a little help from your friends.

Friends and Foes - Friendship and Conflict: CALL FOR PAPERS

Multi-disciplinary Postgraduate Conference, Queen’s University Belfast, 16th-17th November 2007

History and life are filled with stories of friendship and conflict, either in the realm of personal interaction or political engagements. This postgraduate research conference seeks to explore themes of friendship and conflict in the modern era.

We are interested in 20-minute papers which explore the concepts of friendship and conflict (and their interrelation) from a multi-disciplinary point of view, calling for contributions from philosophers, anthropologists, political theorists, sociologists, theologians, literary and cultural theorists.

Some topics to be addressed are:

• philosophical, sociological, psychological or political theories of friendship and conflict
• different types of friendship and conflict as encountered in contemporary life
• the nature of friendship and conflict as it relates to issues of identity, class, culture, age or gender
• the difficulties of making, keeping or losing friends
• the impact of environments and technologies on the nature of friendship and conflict
• utopias
• different representations of friendship and conflict in the media, film or the arts.

300 word abstracts in Microsoft Word should be submitted by 20th July 2007 to the following e-mail address: friendsandfoesqub@hotmail.co.uk

More info here

Hospitality, it is sometimes said, is the vaseline of business.

Well, now it's official, at least in the pharmaceuticals industry, According to PharmaLive, the trade newsletter: 'Drug reps increase drug sales by influencing physicians, and they do so with finely titrated doses of friendship.'

Adriane Fugh-Berman and Shahram Ahari, a former Eli Lilly drug rep, have researched the tactics used by drug reps to manipulate physicians into selling drugs. 'Friendship' is a specific strategy. Amicable doctors are their favourite victims, since they are easily manipulated. Resistant doctors are offered various inducements of such supposed friendship to win them round.