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

Abstract

High-quality friendships improve mental health in young people with childhood adversity (CA). Social stress buffering, the phenomenon of a social partner attenuating acute stress responses, may be one mechanism underlying this relationship. We examined whether perceived friendship quality was related to improved mental health and well-being (N = 102) and lower neural stress responses using the Montreal Imaging Stress Task (n = 62) in young people (aged 16-26) with mild to moderate CA. A principal component analysis revealed two dimensions of CA resembling threat or deprivation like experiences. Hence, we investigated both cumulative and dimension specific effects of CA. First, we found that higher friendship quality was associated with improved mental health and well-being, but not that CA (neither cumulative nor dimensional) was related to friendship quality. Furthermore, acute stress increased state anxiety and enhanced neural activity in five frontolimbic brain regions, including the left hippocampus. Preliminarily, we found that threat experiences interacted with friendship quality to predict left hippocampal reactivity to acute stress. However, this effect did not survive correction for multiple comparisons. Therefore, future research is needed to examine the role friendships play in aiding neural responses to acute stress in young people with childhood threat experiences.