The stress-buffering role of friendships in young people with childhood threat experiences: a preliminary report.

Background: High-quality friendships have a positive impact on the mental health of young people with childhood adversity (CA). Social stress buffering, the phenomenon of a social partner attenuating acute stress responses, is a potential yet unexplored mechanism that may underlie this relationship.Objective: This study examined whether perceived friendship quality was related to better mental health and lower neural stress response in young people with CA.Method: A total of N = 102 young people (aged 16-26) with low to moderate CA were included in the study. We first investigated associations between friendship quality, mental health, and CA. In a representative subset (n = 62), we assessed neural stress responses using the Montreal Imaging Stress Task. In our sample, CA was best described along two dimensions resembling threat or deprivation like experiences. Hence, we investigated both cumulative and dimensional effects of CA.Results: We found no support for social thinning after CA, meaning that the severity of CA (cumulative or dimensional) did not differentially impact friendship quality. High-quality friendships, on the other hand, were strongly associated with better mental health. Furthermore, acute stress increased state anxiety and enhanced neural activity in five frontolimbic brain regions, including the left hippocampus. We found weak support that threat experiences interacted with friendship quality to predict left hippocampal reactivity to stress. However, this effect did not survive multiple comparison correction.Conclusion: The absence of social thinning in our sample may suggest that the risk of developing impoverished social networks is low for rather well-functioning young people with low to moderate CA. Regardless, our findings align with prior research, consistently showing a strong association between high-quality friendships and better mental health in young people with CA. Future research is needed to examine whether friendships aid neural stress responses in young people with childhood threat experiences.

Young people with childhood adversity underwent acute stress induction, eliciting frontolimbic reactivity.High-quality friendships were strongly associated with better mental health.Weak support for friendship stress buffering did not survive multiple comparison correction.

REACT study protocol: resilience after the COVID-19 threat (REACT) in adolescents.

INTRODUCTION: COVID-19-related social isolation and stress may have significant mental health effects, including post-traumatic stress, anxiety and depression. These factors are thought to disproportionately affect populations at risk of psychopathology, such as adolescents with a history of childhood adversity (CA). Therefore, examining which factors may buffer the impact of COVID-19-related stress and isolation in vulnerable adolescents is critical. The Resilience After the COVID-19 Threat (REACT) study assesses whether emotion regulation capacity, inflammation and neuroimmune responses to stress induced in the laboratory prior to the pandemic predict responses to COVID-19-related social isolation and stress in adolescents with CA. We aim to elucidate the mechanisms that enable vulnerable adolescents to maintain or regain good mental health when confronted with COVID-19. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: We recruited 79 adolescents aged 16-26 with CA experiences from the Resilience After Individual Stress Exposure study in which we assessed emotion regulation, neural and immune stress responses to an acute stress task. Our sample completed questionnaires at the start of the UK lockdown ('baseline'; April 2020) and three (July 2020) and 6 months later (October 2020) providing crucial longitudinal information across phases of the pandemic progression and government response. The questionnaires assess (1) mental health, (2) number and severity of life events, (3) physical health, (4) stress perception and (5) loneliness and friendship support. We will use multilevel modelling to examine whether individual differences at baseline are associated with responses to COVID-19-related social isolation and stress. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: This study has been approved by the Cambridge Psychology Research Ethics Committee (PRE.2020.037). Results of the REACT study will be disseminated in publications in scientific peer-reviewed journals, presentations at scientific conferences and meetings, publications and presentations for the general public, and through social media.