The development of compassionate engagement and action scales for self and others
By Paul Gilbert, Francisca Catarino, C. Duarte, M. Matos, Russell Kolts, J. Stubbs, Laura Ceresatto, Joana Duarte, José Pinto-Gouveia, Jaskaran Basran. 2017
458 citations recorded by the source corpus.
BackgroundStudies of the value of compassion on physical and mental health and social relationships have proliferated in the last 25 years. Although, there are several conceptualisations and measures of compassion, this study develops three new measures of compassion competencies derived from an evolutionary, motivational approach. The scales assess 1. the compassion we experience for others, 2. the compassion we experience from others, and 3. self-compassion based on a standard definition of compassion as a ‘sensitivity to suffering in self and others with a commitment to try to alleviate and prevent it’. We explored these in relationship to other compassion scales, self-criticism, depression, anxiety, stress and well-being.MethodsParticipants from three different countries (UK, Portugal and USA) completed a range of scales including compassion for others, self-compassion, self-criticism, shame, depression, anxiety and stress with the newly developed ‘The Compassionate Engagement and Actions’ scale.ResultsAll three scales have good validity. Interestingly, we found that the three orientations of compassion are only moderately correlated to one another (r < .5). We also found that some elements of self-compassion (e.g., being sensitive to, and moved by one’s suffering) have a complex relationship with other attributes of compassion (e.g., empathy), and with depression, anxiety and stress.A path-analysis showed that self-compassion is a significant mediator of the association between self-reassurance and well-being, while self-criticism has a direct effect on depressive symptoms, not mediated by self-compassion.DiscussionCompassion evolved from caring motivation and in humans is associated with a range of different socially intelligent competencies. Understanding how these competencies can be inhibited and facilitated is an important research endeavour. These new scales were designed to assess these competencies.ConclusionsThis is the first study to measure the three orientations of compassion derived from an evolutionary model of caring motivation with specified competencies. Our three new measures of compassion further indicate important complex relationships between different potentiation’s of compassion, well-being, and vulnerability to psychopathologies.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/56e9188efc515a1c7183bcc85a974c9f3376b154
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Clinical Psychology
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- A Meta-Analysis of Compassion-Based Interventions: Current State of Knowledge and Future Directions. (2017, unknown): “The newly developed Compassion Engagement and Action Scale offers a new approach in assessing compassion motivation, which will be helpful for compassion researchers (Gilbert et al., 2017).”
- The Development and Validation of the State Self-Compassion Scale (Long- and Short Form) (2020, background): “Future research may want to develop state measures consistent with other conceptualizations (e.g., Gilbert et al. 2017; Gu et al. 2019) to determine if there are substantive differences between these models in terms of the link between self-compassion and well-being.”