Adolescent same-sex and opposite-sex best friend interactions.

In the present study, 48 high school juniors selected their best same-sex and opposite-sex friends for a videotaping of 10-minute face-to-face interactions together. Females felt more comfortable during same-sex interactions than during opposite-sex interactions, and they rated their same-sex partners more positively than did males. Although second-by-second codings of the videotapes yielded no group differences on the percentage of time the dyads were in interested or animated states, females were in more playful states during their same-sex interactions and males were more playful during their interactions with females.