Maximilian König, PhD

Friendship Stress Buffering in Young People with Childhood Adversity

Around 60% of young people worldwide experience at least one form of childhood adversity, such as abuse, neglect, bullying, or poverty. These stressful experiences can have long-lasting effects and significantly increase the risk of mental health problems. To aid future intervention and prevention efforts, my doctoral research examined how childhood adversity contributes to mental health difficulties, and whether and how friendships can help protect against these effects.

Using a combination of literature reviews, behavioral studies, and brain imaging research (see below), my colleagues and I found that young people with more severe childhood adversity were at greater risk of social isolation, being harmed or harming others, and developing mental health problems. This was partly due to differences in how they process and perceive stress. In addition, we found that those with strong, high-quality friendships reported lower stress perceptions and fewer mental health difficulties.

These findings matter for two key reasons. First, they detail how childhood adversity increases vulnerability to mental health problems. Second, they demonstrate that high-quality friendships play a critical protective role in mental health – and help explain how, by reducing stress perceptions. Hence, helping young people build and maintain supportive friendships could be an important way to promote mental health, especially for those who have faced childhood adversity.

The full PhD dissertation can be found here.

#1: How does child maltreatment contribute to victimization?

For my first PhD project, I conducted a literature review examining the "cycle of victimization" — a well-documented pattern where individuals who experience child maltreatment are at greater risk of victimizing others later in life. This work explored several neurocognitive mechanisms underlying this cycle, such as attentional biases to threat, and investigated the protective role of social support in disrupting this pattern. A key takeaway from this research is that of course not all individuals who have experienced maltreatment are destined to perpetrate victimization. Instead, protective factors like social support can play a crucial role in breaking the cycle of victimization and fostering resilience.

Published in Handbook of Clinical Neurology: Brain and Crime.

#2: Do friendships reduce neural stress responses in young people with childhood adversity?

For my second PhD project, I conducted a preregistered systematic literature review to explore the existing body of knowledge on friendship stress buffering in young people with childhood adversity. Specifically, I searched for empirical studies published in English that investigated friendship effects on neurobiological mechanisms in adolescents and young adults (aged 10-24) with childhood adversity. After screening over 4,000 articles, it became apparent that only four studies met my search criteria. Out of these, only two studies directly tested for friendship stress buffering effects, underscoring the necessity for further research in this area.

Published in Current Opinion in Psychology.

#3: What are the neural mechanisms behind friendship stress buffering in young people with childhood adversity?

For my third PhD project, I analyzed cross-sectional behavioral and neuroimaging data to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying friendship stress buffering in young people with childhood adversity. This research took place at the University of Cambridge (UK) and involved 102 adolescents and young adults (aged 16-26), all of whom had experienced low to moderate levels of childhood adversity. Among other noteworthy findings, we showed that high-quality friendships were strongly associated with better mental health and that acute stress enhanced neural activity in five frontolimbic brain regions, including the left hippocampus. Additionally, we found that threat experiences may interact with friendship quality to predict left hippocampal reactivity to acute stress. However, future research is needed to validate and extend our findings.

Published in European Journal of Psychotraumatology.

#4: Did friendships help protect young people with childhood adversity from mental health challenges during COVID-19?

For my fourth PhD project, I analyzed longitudinal behavioral data from the same UK sample of young people with childhood adversity (see #3), but this time to investigate how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted their mental health alongside friendship buffering effects on their symptomatology. To highlight a few of our key findings, we showed that compared to pre-pandemic baseline levels depressive symptoms significantly increased during the pandemic. We also showed that across four assessment timepoints, greater perceived friendship quality was associated with lower levels of depressive symptoms. In fact, high-quality friendship support before the pandemic buffered depressive symptoms during the pandemic through reducing perceived stress.

Published in Development and Psychopathology.

#5: Do friendships influence autobiographical memory processing in young people with childhood adversity?

For my final PhD project, I analyzed cross-sectional behavioral data to investigate the role of friendship support in buffering perceived stress and depressive symptoms, as well as its relationship with autobiographical memory specificity, in 100 young people (aged 18-24) with childhood adversity. While more severe childhood adversity was linked to higher levels of depressive symptoms, stronger friendship support was associated with lower perceived stress and fewer depressive symptoms. However, friendship support did not appear to influence autobiographical memory specificity.

Preprint available on PsyArXiv.

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