The Company You Keep : Personality and Friendship Characteristics

Theory and research on sex differences in adjustment focus largely on parental, societal, and biological influences. However, it also is important to consider how peers contribute to girls' and boys' development. This article provides a critical review of sex differences in several peer relationship processes, including behavioral and social-cognitive styles, stress and coping, and relationship provisions. The authors present a speculative peer-socialization model based on this review in which the implications of these sex differences for girls' and boys' emotional and behavioral development are considered. Central to this model is the idea that sex-linked relationship processes have costs and benefits for girls' and boys' adjustment. Finally, the authors present recent research testing certain model components and propose approaches for testing understudied aspects of the model.

We describe the HEXACO-60, a short personality inventory that assesses the 6 dimensions of the HEXACO model of personality structure. We selected the 10 items of each of the 6 scales from the longer HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised (Ashton & Lee, 2008; Lee & Ashton, 2004, 2006), with the aim of representing the broad range of content that defines each dimension. In self-report data from samples of college students and community adults, the scales showed reasonably high levels of internal consistency reliability and rather low interscale correlations. Correlations of the HEXACO-60 scales with measures of the Big Five factors were consistent with theoretical expectations, and convergent correlations between self-reports and observer reports on the HEXACO-60 scales were high, averaging above .50. We recommend the HEXACO-60 for use in personality assessment contexts in which administration time is limited.