- Best friends
- Best friends and mental health
- Having a best friend and having a good mental state
- The connection between having a best friend and being a strong communicator of feelings.
- People that have a proclaimed “best friend” are better at communicating and have better mental health than those who lack the interpersonal connection.
- Those who have a best friend learn interpersonal and communication skills, which allows them to have a better understanding of their own emotions, thus strengthening their own mental health and making them well rounded, and better acclimated in society.
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 
Interesting idea, LoCaM.
It’s pretty “squishy” so far because of the ambiguity of your category and the need for your test population to “self-proclaim” that they belong to it, but it has promise.
Would someone who claims to have “tons of friends” but can’t name one as “best” qualify? Or someone who says, “well, if I had to name a BEST friend, it would be Cindy”? Or someone who says, “That would have to be my wife,” meaning “I don’t want to insult her”?
In other words, it might be hard to study, unless you want to conduct some first-person research that would start by weeding out all those sorts of responses.
I am interested to hear what you would say about how often violent actors are described after the fact as “loners” and whether you think there’s a connection between friendlessness and radical social volatility or violence.
Let’s see where this goes, but you’re going to need either a very strong “lead resource” or some real specificity about your subject before we can get much accomplished.