Juliana Breines
Juliana Breines is a social and health psychologist at the University of Rhode Island. With Serena Chen she ran the four experiments that are the best available answer to the standard objection to self-compassion, which is that being kind to yourself is just letting yourself off. Her participants, made kinder to themselves after a failure, worked harder rather than less hard.
Who they are
Her work covers self-compassion, motivation after setbacks, and how a gentler stance towards your own setbacks affects the body's stress response.
The design is why this matters. Most research on self-compassion training compares it against a waiting list, which controls for the passage of time and nothing else: not attention, not expectation, not the belief that you are being helped. Breines and Chen compared self-compassion against a self-esteem condition and against positive distraction. That is a real comparison, and it is why four modest experiments carry more weight here than several larger trials do.
She is first author, and she is independent of Kristin Neff. That matters in a literature where a great deal of the evidence is Neff on Neff. Credit Breines, not Chen, and not Neff.
Key papers
Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). "Self-Compassion Increases Self-Improvement Motivation", Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133 to 1143. First author. Four experiments.
Key ideas
Experiment 3 is the best single result in this cluster. After failing a first test, participants who had been made kinder to themselves spent more time studying for a difficult second one. That is behaviour, not a questionnaire, and it is the direct opposite of what the letting-yourself-off objection predicts.
In experiment 4, they chose to look at people who were doing better than them rather than worse. Comparing upwards is uncomfortable, and it is what you do when you intend to improve rather than to feel better.
Experiment 1 concerned beliefs about whether a weakness can change, which is the neighbouring literature on fixed and growth mindsets.
The comparison conditions are the whole argument. Beating a waiting list shows that doing something beats doing nothing. Beating a self-esteem boost shows something about self-compassion in particular.
Concepts on this site
Find them elsewhere
Nothing confirmed. A search was run and no website or account could be tied to this person with enough certainty to publish. A name match on its own is not evidence, and a wrong link here would be worse than none.
Checked 2026-09-11. Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.
Sources
- Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133 to 1143.
- Affiliation confirmed 2026-09-11 against the University of Rhode Island psychology record.