Serena Chen
Serena Chen is a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, where she chairs the psychology department. She works on the self and identity, on authenticity, on power in close relationships and on self-compassion. She is the second author of the 2012 experiments showing that being kind to yourself after a failure raises rather than lowers the motivation to do better.
Who they are
Her post was confirmed on 11 September 2026 against the Berkeley psychology record.
The 2012 work is the answer to the obvious objection that treating yourself gently is a licence to give up. The design is what makes it persuasive: the kind-to-yourself condition was tested not against doing nothing, but against a self-esteem boost and against a pleasant distraction, which is a much harder comparison than a waiting list.
Key papers
Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). "Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation", Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133 to 1143. Second author. Four experiments. After failing a first test, people in the self-compassion condition spent longer studying for a harder second one. In another of the four, people who had just reflected kindly on a personal weakness chose to look at others doing better than themselves rather than worse.
Key ideas
The credit line. Juliana Breines is the first author and takes the credit in body copy on this site, per house rule. Chen has a page because the work is hers too, not because her name is the recognisable one.
The result that matters is a behaviour, time spent studying, rather than a questionnaire about how motivated somebody feels. That is rare in this literature and it is why the study carries as much weight here as it does.
The upward-comparison result is the subtler one. Looking at people doing better than you can be a verdict on yourself or a source of information about how to improve, and kindness towards yourself seems to move it towards the second.
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 Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.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.
- Vault verification record, 2026-09-11. Affiliation confirmed against the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology record.