Journal article
Soothing Your Heart and Feeling Connected: A New Experimental Paradigm to Study the Benefits of Self-Compassion
- Abstract:
- Self-compassion and its cultivation in psychological interventions are associated with improved mental health and well-being. However, the underlying processes for this are not well understood. We randomly assigned 135 participants to study the effect of two short-term self-compassion exercises on self-reported-state mood and psychophysiological responses compared to three control conditions of negative (rumination), neutral, and positive (excitement) valence. Increased self-reported-state self-compassion, affiliative affect, and decreased self-criticism were found after both self-compassion exercises and the positive-excitement condition. However, a psychophysiological response pattern of reduced arousal (reduced heart rate and skin conductance) and increased parasympathetic activation (increased heart rate variability) were unique to the self-compassion conditions. This pattern is associated with effective emotion regulation in times of adversity. As predicted, rumination triggered the opposite pattern across self-report and physiological responses. Furthermore, we found partial evidence that physiological arousal reduction and parasympathetic activation precede the experience of feeling safe and connected.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 324.8KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1177/2167702618812438
Authors
- Publisher:
- SAGE Publications
- Journal:
- Clinical Psychological Science More from this journal
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 3
- Pages:
- 545-565
- Publication date:
- 2019-02-06
- Acceptance date:
- 2018-06-09
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2167-7034
- ISSN:
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2167-7026
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
pubs:976980
- UUID:
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uuid:b0deddef-3393-42de-9acf-d4b5aef92ad2
- Local pid:
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pubs:976980
- Source identifiers:
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976980
- Deposit date:
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2019-06-28
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Kirschner et al
- Copyright date:
- 2019
- Notes:
- © The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
- Licence:
- Other
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