It’s the start of the university term - who will be best at making friends?

Making new friends is one of the most important goals for students when they arrive at university for the first time. But which personalities are most successful at making and extending friendship groups? Now new research suggests that the most emotionally intelligent people develop more friendships in the long-run, while those with narcissistic personalities struggle to maintain their early success in making friends. The field study, carried out by an international team of academics from four different countries, has used a unique statistical technique based on social network analysis - the "temporal exponential random graph model" - to analyse the dynamics of peer popularity. By studying 15 peer groups of students at the start of university and then again three months later, they concluded that people high in narcissism - characterised as having excessively positive undeserved self-regard and a constant desire for external self-affirmation - were popular initially. However, their popularity increased less over time than people who were less narcissistic. In contrast, emotionally intelligent people increased more in popularity over time than less emotionally intelligent people. "Our results suggest that narcissism is rather disadvantageous and that emotional intelligence is rather advantageous for long-term popularity," the researchers concluded.