In this article, I explore laughter as a form of multimodal play in which adolescents' engage across contexts and in various configurations. With a few recent exceptions, a focus on unscripted play is largely missing from ongoing research and discussion about the education of adolescents. Whereas the space to play has been vitally important to the…

Early adolescence represents a particularly vulnerable period of development during which young people are susceptible to establishing lifelong behavior patterns associated with poor life, health, and educational outcomes. Previous research demonstrates older adolescents and young adults often experience negative life events (NLEs) prior to…

Adolescents struggle to establish their own identities and become independent in making the transition from childhood to adulthood. Adolescent alienation can result from changes in family structure from traditional two-parent families to one-parent families, decreased family stability, increased mobility of society, population increases,…

In a study of French-speaking adolescents (n=547), five measures designed to examine psychological well being found that body image, self-esteem, and negative stressful life events mediate the relationship between gender and depressive symptoms during adolescence. Further analysis of a subsample who recently transitioned to high school also found…

Examines the various coping strategies that competitive adolescent athletes use to deal with errors, penalties, and unpleasant comments from spectators. Identifies and discusses four coping strategies: avoidance, approach, task-focused, and emotion-focused. Briefly reviews the literature on coping and the results of a survey of Australian…

This paper outlines a qualitative research tool designed to explore personal identity formation as described by Erik Erikson and offers self-reflective and anonymous evaluative comments made by college students after completing this task. Subjects compiled a list of 200 myths, customs, fables, rituals, and beliefs from their family of origin and…

The relationship of parent personality to child psychopathology has been investigated in numerous studies over the past three decades, using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). To investigate response patterns of both parents and offspring, the MMPI responses of 197 families with adolescents entering inpatient or outpatient…

Recent research among adolescents has found a positive association between private self-consciousness and peer self-disclosure, and a negative association between such disclosure and loneliness. High school students (N=207) who had participated in an earlier study (Franzoi and Davis, in press) were contacted 1 year later, and the same variables…

Relations among hormone levels, emotional dispositions, and aggressive attributes were examined in 56 boys and 52 girls, aged 9 to 14 years. (PCB)

Describes an empirical study that examined the effects of computer use by children and adolescents for possible negative psycho-social effects. Results showed no indication of negative effects of working or playing with computers; data points toward certain positive effects of computer use. (Author/LS)

Parents rated the fears of their autistic children (n=14), and results were compared with ratings for nonhandicapped same-sex, same-age (2.5-17 years) peers. More autistic children than nonhandicapped children were rated as having specific common fears. Fears of autistic children were often different suggesting qualitative variations or…

Data were examined to determine (1) the stability of negative emotional characteristics from early life through adolescence; (2) the degree of relation between these emotional characteristics and adjustment in childhood and adolescence; and (3) the degree to which the characteristics differentially predict multiple adjustment dimensions in…

Evaluation of the psychiatric histories and projective test responses of 102 sexually abused girls found that the following characteristics of abuse were significantly associated with greater psychological disturbance: more than one perpetrator, an early age of abuse onset, and periods of intense and frequent abuse episodes. A relatively stable…

Investigated effects of pubertal, social, and biological factors on negative affect of 103 White girls aged 10 t0 14 years. Results indicate that social factors, and the interaction of negative life events and pubertal factors, accounted for more variance than did hormonal pubertal factors alone. (RJC)

In order to prevent cigarette smoking in young adolescents, the factors which cause it need to be better understood. A study was conducted to investigate the contribution of three psychosocial factors, suggested by previous theory and research, on smoking in a longitudinal sample of seventh graders (N=3,940) who were studied again in the eighth…