Eloisa Carvalho
A team of French Canadian researchers followed 400 adolescents’ friendships with members of the opposite sex and published their findings in the Journal of Research on Adolescence. Among their findings: while girls receive certain perks from befriending boys- access to alcohol from boys who reached the legal drinking age of 18 first, for example- adolescent girls tend to receive the most emotional support from their friends of the same sex, while boys receive their emotional support from their opposite sex friends. Girls who had a larger number of opposite-sex friends at a younger age tended to use alcohol and drugs at a higher rate, while boys with a large number of female friends did not.