Close friendships are important for us all but they may assume an even more vital role for adolescents in chronic pain whose condition makes it more difficult for them to participate in social activities. Indeed studies have shown that adolescents with chronic pain tend to report more stressful interactions with close friends and others. Also, adolescents' interpretation of their friends behavior fluctuates between supportive and non-supportive. A reason often cited for lack of support is that their pain-free friends lack an understanding of what it's like to live with pain.
Forgeron et al (2011) gave a questionnaire consisting of 12 vignettes to a group of adolescents with chronic pain and a group of healthy controls. Each vignette presented an interaction between a teen with chronic pain and a healthy friend in a social situation. Participants were asked to rate the behavior of the healthy character as supportive or non-supportive toward the character with chronic pain, provide a rationale for their rating, and then rate how angry, distressed, or upset they'd be if they were the character with the pain or the character without pain.
Some interesting results...
The presence of chronic pain made no difference to participants' ratings of ambiguous social situations. I find this somewhat surprising because it's ambiguous situations where there is the most latitude for interpretation.
Pain was related to ratings of non-supportive vignettes. Specifically, adolescent participants in chronic pain rated the behaviors of the healthy friend in the non-supportive vignettes as being more negative than their healthy counterparts. Thus, teens with chronic pain seem to be more sensitive to potentially non-supportive social situations.
A couple things to keep in mind, thought. First, the effect sizes were small. Chronic pain explained only 6.5% of the variance in ratings of the unsupportive scenarios. That means that there were potentially many additional influences or other stronger forces determining how unsupportive social situations are interpreted.
Second, participant responses were obtained via face-to-face interviews. I can tell you from work on my own studies, that the mere presence of another person can influence participant responses, sometimes to a remarkable extent.
But interesting results, nonetheless.
Forgeron, P. A., McGrath, P., Stevens, B., Evans, J., Dick, B., Finley, G. A., & Carlson, T. (2011). Social information processing in adolescents with chronic pain: My friends don't really understand me. Pain, 152(12), 2773–2780. doi:10.1016/j.pain.2011.09.001
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