Madeleine Ferrari
Madeleine Ferrari is a clinical psychologist and academic at Australian Catholic University, working on self-compassion as a buffer against perfectionism and depression. She is first author of the 2019 meta-analysis of randomised trials of self-compassion interventions, which is the strongest evidence that the practice does something rather than merely correlating with something. She also publishes under the surname Fraser.
Who they are
The distinction her review supplies is the important one. Most of what is known about self-compassion comes from questionnaires, which can only show that people who score one way also score another. A randomised trial takes people, assigns them at random to a training or to a comparison condition, and looks at what changes. Her review pooled 27 of those across 11 different outcomes.
The caveats travel with the numbers. The self-compassion outcome is itself measured with the disputed questionnaire, so that part of the result partly re-runs the argument between Peter Muris and Kristin Neff about what the scale measures. And many trials in this literature use waiting-list comparisons, which control for the passage of time and nothing else: not attention, not expectation, not group contact, not the belief that you are being helped. Where a trial beats only a waiting list, what it has shown is that doing something beats doing nothing.
Key papers
Ferrari, M., et al. (2019). "Self-Compassion Interventions and Psychosocial Outcomes: a Meta-Analysis of RCTs", Mindfulness, 10, 1455 to 1473. First author. 27 randomised controlled trials across 11 outcomes. Hedges' g: self-compassion 0.75, stress 0.67, depression 0.66, mindfulness 0.62, anxiety 0.57, self-criticism 0.56, eating behaviour 1.76, rumination 1.37.
Key ideas
In plain terms, the depression and stress results are moderate: the average person who did the training ended up better off than roughly two-thirds of the people who did not.
The eating and rumination results are much larger and rest on fewer trials, which is exactly the pattern to be careful with. Big numbers from thin evidence usually come down as the evidence thickens.
Randomised trials are what move a construct from interesting correlation to plausible cause, and this is the review that did it for self-compassion.
The weakest link is the comparison condition, not the size of the effect. A literature that mostly beats waiting lists has not yet shown what specifically is doing the work.
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
- Ferrari, M., et al. (2019). Mindfulness, 10, 1455 to 1473.
- Affiliation confirmed 2026-09-11. She also publishes under the surname Fraser.