Maximilian König, PhD

Synchrony between brain age maturation and internalising and externalising symptoms across adolescence Abstract Background: Adolescence is a period of rapid neurobiological and behavioural change, yet it remains unclear how deviations from normative brain maturation relate to the development of interna...

New year🎊, new preprint📰

Using multimodal brain-age prediction models trained and tested on 4-wave MRI data from #ABCD, we examined how deviations in brain age align with changes in internalising and externalising symptoms across 10 waves.

1/4🧵

It’s grad school application season, and I wanted to give some public advice.

Caveats:
-*-*-*-*


> These are my opinions, based on my experiences, they are not secret tricks or guarantees

> They are general guidelines, not meant to cover a host of idiosyncrasies and special cases

Just published! ✨ Across 15+ timepoints, we found that unpredictability in economic hardship – not only severity – shapes young children’s self-regulation. Understanding these dynamics can help us design supports that promote stability and adaptive development. 👉 bit.ly/4oIZO75

I'm recruiting PhD students for my lab at Northwestern! I'm reviewing applications for the Department of Psychology for the Cognitive Affective Neuroscience and Clinical areas, due 12/1. 🧠

Come join the CATS Lab: nucatslab.com

Learn about our latest research: iamh.northwestern.edu/research/res...

I’m deeply grateful and proud to have defended my PhD on Thursday! Thankful for an inspiring committee with thought-provoking questions, the love and support from colleagues, friends, and family, and above all, for the best Doktormutter anyone could wish for.

Co-producing an interdisciplinary, preventative mental health intervention: development of the building resilience through socioemotional training (ReSET) programme Adolescence is a developmental period of increased susceptibility to mental health problems. In response to rising rates of psychopathology in this age group, there have been calls to develop new o...

How do we work with young people to develop new mental health interventions that draw on different disciplines? In this new paper, we outline our approach in developing the @resetproject.bsky.social programme, a new transdiagnostic preventative intervention for young people 👇

lnkd.in/eYkuaHZB

Today is #WorldSuicidePreventionDay.

Worried someone might be struggling with suicidal thoughts?

Your presence can be powerful. A simple check-in could be the lifeline they need. 💙

Learn more about #SuicidePrevention 👉 bit.ly/4phPYKi

Really excited that my first PhD paper is now out in @elife.bsky.social: Sense of control buffers against stress.

This has been a great team effort with Jinyu Shi, Dan McGlade, @docqhuys.bsky.social and Niko Steinbeis, comprising two studies and a total of N=768!

Summary thread below 🧵⬇️

I still get chills

Meet Mike
*30+ years severe depression
*first hospitalized @ 13y
*20 meds
*3 rounds of ECT
*2 near-fatal suicide attempts

Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE

see videos, read paper, follow thread
doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Positive Affect as a Developmental Mediator of Early Adversity and Internalizing Psychopathology Early life adversities (ELAs) including experiences such as abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction are strongly linked to psychopathology; yet, the developmental pathways connecting ELA to external...

🆕 RESEARCH: Not all kids respond to early adversity the same way. We examined data from ~7,400 children for 4 years and found something notable about positive emotions & mental health outcomes...
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

A thread 🧵 #MentalHealth #ChildDevelopment #Resilience /1

Psychologists & related fields: what is a big methods question that you believe remains somewhat unanswered & that you'd love to see adressed? There may be an opportunity for a large-scale meta-science project with many teams trying to figure out a question.

Any thoughts welcome! #psychscisky

A Lay Theory of the Successful Graduate Student/Academic Just recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece on what it takes to be successful in an academic career.  It was a pleasant essay, which emphasized some of the usual suspects like indu…

As I am going over old blog posts, here is a nice blog by @bwroberts.bsky.social on qualities in graduate students that, in his opinion, lead to a successful career in academia. Still very good advice. pigee.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/a...

Experimentology cover: title and curves for distributions.

Experimentology is out today!!! A group of us wrote a free online textbook for experimental methods, available at experimentology.io - the idea was to integrate open science into all aspects of the experimental workflow from planning to design, analysis, and writing.

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨
We used machine learning to examine how early life adversity ⚠️ is associated with the adolescent brain 🧠 in the ABCD Study across 7 adversity dimensions and 3 timepoints.
👉https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.11.659188v1

Pro tip, folks: if you make a figure for a publication, don’t just hand the copyright over to the publisher. Post it on OSF first and then give yourself permission to use it in the first publication and then all future publications. That way, no permissions issues.

Are you an international early career scholar considering spending time in the Netherlands? We likely have capacity to host a Marie Curie Fellow if you are interested. Our lab (lifespancognitivedynamics.com) works on modeling cognitive change in early or later life, at short and long timescales.

Exam stress: how to understand your child’s brain Sarah-Jayne Blakemore explains what happens to brains under pressure

My article in The Times today

Exam stress: how to understand your child’s brain

www.thetimes.com/article/fdbc...

I wrote an Article about the Netflix drama, Adolescence.

Free version here

archive.is/goNeQ

Yaaaaaay!! This is wonderful news, Bridget. Huge congratulations 🥳

Thank you for creating this starter pack. I would love to be added.

Current Directions in Psychological Science article entitled More Than Just a Phase: Adolescence as a Window Into How the Brain Generates Behavior

Excited to share this brief review where @katieinsel.bsky.social & I discuss studying adolescence to understand how brains work! We highlight avenues for future collaborative work at the intersection of cognitive, computational, & developmental neuroscience 🧠
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

These findings underscore the importance of fostering stable and supportive friendships in young people with childhood adversity - especially during times of multidimensional stress.

🔸Greater friendship quality = lower depressive & anxiety symptoms.
🔸Stress reduction was a key mechanism behind the friendship buffering effect.

Key findings:
🔸Depressive symptoms steadily increased following the COVID-19 outbreak.
🔸Anxiety symptoms spiked during the first lockdown but returned to pre-pandemic baseline levels afterward.
🔸Surprisingly, perceived friendship quality improved during lockdowns.

Longitudinal data from 102 young people (ages 16-26) with childhood adversity revealed that high-quality friendships before the COVID-19 pandemic buffered mental health symptoms during the pandemic through reducing perceived stress.

🚨New Paper in Development and Psychopathology🚨

Can friendships protect the mental health of vulnerable young people during a global crisis? Our latest longitudinal study suggests yes - and offers an explanation why!

Read more: doi.org/10.1017/S095....

Assessing evidence based on scale can be a useful predictor of policy outcomes - Policy Sciences With growing interest in more formalized applications of scientific evidence to policy, there are concerns about what evidence is selected and applied, and for what purpose. We present an initial argu...

In a study of 100 policies & 250 policymakers, we find that a) there's no such thing as the "best" type of evidence, and b) the scale of evidence used in decisions can be a strong predictor of policy effectiveness.

Freely available to all @policysciences.bsky.social

🌵Out now! Using an RL task that manipulates people's beliefs about agency, we show that exposure to & severity of early-life adversity is associated with lower learning rates & agency beliefs. w/ the brillant @thephelpslab.bsky.social, Kate McLaughlin, & Bryan Dong learnmem.cshlp.org/content/32/1...

Adolescent girls’ explanations of high rates of low mood and anxiety in their population: a co-produced qualitative study - BMC Women's Health Background From early adolescence, girls face greater risk of experiencing low mood and anxiety relative to boys, with recent evidence that this may be worsening. There is a paucity of mental health r...

We talk a lot about why adolescent girls report more low mood and anxiety, and why this might be getting worse.

But what do girls themselves think might explain this? As you might have guessed, we don’t really know.

So, we asked them: doi.org/10.1186/s129...

1/8

New preprint: Friendship buffering and autobiographical memory specificity in young people with childhood adversity.

doi.org/10.31234/osf...