International Day of Friendship

The United Nations (UN) proclaimed that 30 July would be recognised as the International Day of Friendship in 2011. In 2024, the day promotes human solidarity in the face of global challenges and crises that undermine peace, security, development and social harmony. The UN encourages governments, international organisations, and society groups to use the day and any associated events to promote citizen dialogue, solidarity, mutual understanding, and reconciliation.

The theme of friendship can be found throughout ACU’s research publications. With strengths in health and wellbeing, religion and critical inquiry, and education, you can find ACU research discussing friendship as both a social mechanism and a vehicle to successful social programs in works from:

• Institute for Positive Psychology and Education
• Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences
• Mary MacKillop Institute for Health Research
• Healthy Brain and Mind Research Centre

Interested readers can see findings from two separate ACU studies that illustrate friendship formation:

• ‘The pet factor - Companion animals as a conduit for getting to know people, friendship formation and social support’
• ‘The upsides and downsides of the dark side: A longitudinal study into the role of prosocial and antisocial strategies in close friendship formation’

Friendship also acts as a significant safety net, affording protection to vulnerable individuals and communities:

• ‘Friends and safeguarding : Young people's views about safety and to whom they would share safety concerns’
• ‘Hope, friends, and subjective well-being : A social network approach to peer group contextual effects’
• ‘The role peer responses to adolescent expression of emotions plays in their emotion regulation: A systematic literature review’

Our behaviours are influenced by our friendships. The following two studies present findings that remind us these influences can improve our lives but also encourage unsafe activities.

• ‘The influence of the maternal peer group (partner, friends, mothers' group, family) on mothers' attitudes to obesity-related behaviours of their children’
• ‘Scottish adolescents' sun-related behaviours, tanning attitudes and associations with skin cancer awareness: A cross-sectional study’

Open access publications allow broader readership for ACU research. You can read these full texts and more of ACU’s research illustrating friendships importance to human wellbeing and as a research observation in the institutional repository, ACU Research Bank.