Many actions of troubled children and adolescents can disguise and conceal their ever-present and deep-seated psycho-emotional pain. Adults living and working with these youth may overlook this pain in a strategy of avoidance. Labelling troubling behavior as "outbursts," "explosions," or "acting out," ignores the…

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is an inherited, progressive and life-limiting neuromuscular disease that affects boys. During their lives, they experience a series of medical and surgical interventions. Research reported in this paper took place in England with 37 young men living with DMD and their families and explored their experiences of…

Adolescents sometimes cut themselves to relieve distress; however, the mechanism is unknown. Previous studies have linked self-injury to deficits in processing emotions symbolically through language. To investigate expressive language of adolescent cutters, the authors analyzed 100 narratives posted on the Internet. Most narratives (n = 66)…

This study examines the peer relations and emotion practices of adolescent boys in light of their expectations and assumptions about masculinity. We carried out semistructured interviews with middle-class and upper-middle-class boys from an independent high school. The boys reported that they assiduously avoided displays of emotional or physical…

Empathy and sympathy play crucial roles in much of human social interaction and are necessary components for healthy coexistence. Sympathy is thought to be a proxy for motivating prosocial behavior and providing the affective and motivational base for moral development. The purpose of the present study was to use functional MRI to characterize…

Reports of adolescents' coping with recurrent pain, symptoms of anxiety/depression, and somatic complaints were obtained from a sample of 164 adolescents with recurrent abdominal pain and their parents. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that coping consisted of 3 nonorthogonal factors: Primary Control Engagement Coping (problem solving,…