Self-compassion and reactions to unpleasant self-relevant events: The implications of treating oneself kindly
Leary and colleagues ran five studies on how self-compassionate people handle unpleasant events, using different methods each time: daily reports of real events, imagined scenarios, reactions to mixed feedback, ratings of one's own recorded performance in an awkward situation, and an induced self-compassionate perspective. The pattern is consistent. Self-compassion predicted milder emotional and cognitive reactions to everyday setbacks, buffered against negative self-feeling when imagining social embarrassment, and moderated the response to ambivalent feedback, particularly among people with low self-esteem. People low in self-compassion rated their own recorded performance worse than observers rated it. The final study is the most useful, because it induced the perspective experimentally rather than measuring it: doing so led people to acknowledge their own part in a negative event without being overwhelmed by it. That combination, responsibility without collapse, is what distinguishes self-compassion from self-esteem, which tends to protect itself by denying the responsibility.
Leary and colleagues ran five studies on how self-compassionate people handle unpleasant events, using different methods each time: daily reports of real events, imagined scenarios, reactions to mixed feedback, ratings of one's own recorded performance in an awkward situation, and an induced self-compassionate perspective. The pattern is consistent. Self-compassion predicted milder emotional and cognitive reactions to everyday setbacks, buffered against negative self-feeling when imagining social embarrassment, and moderated the response to ambivalent feedback, particularly among people with low self-esteem. People low in self-compassion rated their own recorded performance worse than observers rated it. The final study is the most useful, because it induced the perspective experimentally rather than measuring it: doing so led people to acknowledge their own part in a negative event without being overwhelmed by it. That combination, responsibility without collapse, is what distinguishes self-compassion from self-esteem, which tends to protect itself by denying the responsibility.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Study 5 is the induced-perspective result cited here.
Where we use it
- Why You Are Kinder to Your Friends Than to Yourself, Why We Care
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The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.5.887
DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.92.5.887