Ulli Zessin
Ulli Zessin is a German psychologist and the first author of the 2015 pooled analysis relating self-compassion to wellbeing across 79 samples and more than sixteen thousand people. It is the study behind the "79 studies, 16,000 people" figure that circulates in trade books with no name attached to it.
Who they are
His post at SRH University Heidelberg was confirmed on 11 September 2026.
This page exists because this site carried his number second-hand for ten days. One of the books in the vault cited a 2015 review of 79 studies covering over 16,000 volunteers and named nobody. The numbers were right. The attribution was missing. It was traced on 2 September 2026 and confirmed again on 11 September.
Key papers
Zessin, U., Dickhauser, O., & Garbade, S. (2015). "The relationship between self-compassion and well-being: a meta-analysis", Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 7(3), 340 to 364. First author. Seventy-nine samples and 16,416 people. A moderate relationship overall, stronger for psychological wellbeing than for positive mood. Tests for missing studies found no sign that unpublished failures were distorting the picture, and a small experimental subgroup of 394 people supports reading part of it as cause rather than coincidence.
Key ideas
The strength of the analysis is its size and its checks. It is one of the better-conducted pooled analyses in this area, and it took the trouble to look for the studies that might be missing.
The standing exposure applies here in full. These are mostly questionnaires correlating with other questionnaires, and Peter Muris's objection to how the self-compassion scale is scored bites directly on them. The same caution is recorded on Angus MacBeth's page.
A figure that travels without a name is a figure nobody has checked. That is the reason this page exists at all.
Concepts on this site
Compassionate and Uncompassionate Self-Responding
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 Handles and affiliations go out of date, so treat this block as a snapshot rather than a standing fact.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
- Zessin, U., Dickhauser, O., & Garbade, S. (2015). Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 7(3), 340 to 364. Exact pooled figures are recorded on the self-compassion page.
- Vault attribution record, traced 2026-09-02, confirmed 2026-09-11.