The Relationship Among the Components of Self-compassion: A Pilot Study Using a Compassionate Writing Intervention to Enhance Self-kindness, Common Humanity, and Mindfulness
By Aljoscha Dreisoerner, N. Junker, Rolf van Dick. Journal of Happiness Studies, 2020
107 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Self-compassion has been theorized to have three components, each with a positive pole and a negative pole: self-kindness versus self-judgment, common humanity versus isolation, and mindfulness versus over-identification. Neff (Self Identity 2:85–101, 2003a) proposes that they mutually influence each other, however, this proposition has not been tested yet. We conducted a pilot study to see if improvements from training one component spilled over to the other two—and whether these trainings had an impact on well-being. 80 participants completed 8 weeks of self-compassionate writing exercises to enhance either self-kindness, common humanity, or mindfulness. Trait self-compassion was assessed using the six-factor model of the self-compassion scale. To address issues of alpha-error-inflation, the false discovery rate was fixed at 5%, and critical p values were adjusted accordingly. Participants in the mindfulness condition reported increased total self-compassion (p = .009), which was accompanied by increased self-kindness (p = .027) and lower isolation (p = .045). Participants in the common humanity condition reported improved total self-compassion (p = .018), lower over-identification (p = .045), and higher life-satisfaction (p = .049). The training in self-kindness failed to improve self-kindness or any other factor. These findings provide initial evidence that the components of self-compassion mutually enhance each other. They also emphasize the importance of mindfulness within the conceptualization of self-compassion.
Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/85e2006f75128619e0f40938b8f4369db439af82
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Citations in the corpus
- The Development and Validation of the State Self-Compassion Scale (Long- and Short Form) (2020, background): “The view of self-compassion as a system is supported by the fact that the components change in tandem (Ferrari et al. 2019), they mutually engender one another (Dreisoerner et al. 2020), and they are balanced within individuals (Phillips 2019).”