Self-compassion and attention: self-compassion facilitates disengagement from negative stimuli

ABSTRACT

Self-compassion is a healthy way of relating to the self, and helps to mitigate negative emotions during difficult experiences. Through four studies, we explored the influence of induced self-compassion on affect-biased attention (measured using a dot-probe task) among undergraduates after negative aspects of the self were made salient. We manipulated self-compassion through a writing task and compared its effects on the dot-probe task against a control (studies 1 and 2), self-esteem and emotion disclosure (study 3), and happiness condition (study 4). Prior to the self-compassion induction, feelings of inadequacies (studies 1, 3 and 4), or shame (study 2) were first elicited among participants. The self-compassion condition yielded faster negative disengaging relative to all comparison conditions across all studies. Our studies provide strong evidence that self-compassion does have an effect on automatic, antecedental emotional regulation processes, especially negative disengaging, following the experience of inadequacy, and even a more intense feeling of shame.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-compassion
• self-esteem
• affect-biased attention
• dot-probe task
• emotional regulation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The state self-compassion scale used in Breines and Chen’s (2012) paper was not employed in our study since to our knowledge, it has yet to be validated.

2. Since studies 1 and 2 have ascertained the differential effects of self-compassion compared to a neutral condition, we did not include a neutral condition in our experimental design of studies 3 and 4.

3. All post-hoc tests in this study were conducted using Tukey HSD. We did not use Bonferroni correction as it is unnecessarily conservative and often fail to detect real differences (Lee & Lee, 2018). Nonetheless, when conducted with Bonferroni correction, findings remain significant (except for the comparison between self-esteem and self-compassion in negative disengaging, which remains marginally significant; p =.053).