Impact of Interpersonal Jealousy and Self Loathing on Quality of Friendship and Psychological Distress among University Studen

Abstract

The research aimed to study the Impact of Interpersonal jealousy and Self Loathing on Quality of Friendship and Psychological Distress among University students. In late adolescence and early adulthood, friendship is a very important tool and a social support source for an adolescent’s development by providing approval, understanding, insight and social skills (Hiatt et al., 2015) where inflexibility in accepting your significant other towards other people due to jealousy incriminates in quality of friendship. Meanwhile, past researches has shown that self-disgust, an aspect of self loathing, has been associated with a range of psychological difficulties (Amir et al., 2010) which are indications of psychopathology later on. No doubt, Self loathing and self-hatred are two different things where Self-hatred is extreme criticism of oneself as feeling that nothing you do is good enough or that you are unworthy or undeserving of good things in life but when this negative self evaluation becomes a part of individual as trait is called Self-loathing, encompassing as continual feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and low self-esteem(Turnell,et al., 2019).So, the present study was conducted to understands the roots of how quality of friendship and psychological distress are the implications of negative attitudes such as Interpersonal jealousy (negative attitude towards others) and self loathing (negative attitude towards self) (Begwell, et al., 1998). In order to study, it was hypothesized that Interpersonal Jealousy will be negatively related to Quality of Friendship and positively related to Psychological Distress among University students. Similarly, Self Loathing would be negatively related to Quality of Friendship and positively related to Psychological Distress among university students. Data was collected using Survey research design viii where population was university students (N=400) from early adulthood of age range (18-25years) where male(n=156) and female (n=244). Interpersonal Jealousy Scale (Mathes & Severa, 1981) was used to measure interpersonal jealousy while Friendship Quality Scale (Thien, et al., 2012) was used to study quality of friendship. Meanwhile, self loathing was measured using Self Hatred Scale (Turnell, et al., 2019) and psychological distress was accounted using Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 (Lovibond, 1995). After data collection, results were implied into two catagories of psychological distress and non-distress, to study if significant difference exist among the variables. In order to analyze the data, t-test, regression and correlation were used. The results shows that interpersonal jealousy significantly predict quality of friendship and psychological distress. Further, self loathing significantly predicts quality of friendship and psychological distress. Implications of the study were discussed in the light of results. Keywords: Interpersonal jealousy, self loathing, quality of friendship, psychological distress, university stude