Daily self-compassion protects Asian Americans/Canadians after experiences of COVID-19 discrimination: Implications for subjective well-being and health behaviors

ABSTRACT

Asians are not immune to racial discrimination and discrimination against Asians has heightened during the COVID-19 pandemic because they were blamed as the origin of the virus. A pre-registered 14-day diary explored if self-compassion was associated with subjective well-being and protective behaviors for Asians (U.S. & Canada) who faced COVID-19 discriminations (N = 82 & ndiaries =711). Participants reported discriminations experience for 28% (U.S.) and 25% (Canada) of their days. Daily self-compassion predicted daily subjective well-being despite COVID-19 discrimination experience. Daily self-compassion predicted increased COVID-19 protective behaviors on days Asian Americans experienced COVID-19 discrimination. Daily acceptance, but not daily reappraisal, explained the link between daily self-compassion and daily subjective well-being. These findings could not be accounted for by daily self-esteem.

KEYWORDS:

• Asians
• COVID-19 discriminations
• protective behaviors
• self-compassion
• subjective well-being

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

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Notes

1. We examined whether the results that we found would have changed if we had included people who did not meet our exclusion criteria. We coded all discrimination (1) vs. everything else (0) and entered this code along with self-compassion and cultures into four separate linear mixed models predicting SWB, acceptance, reappraisal, and covid behaviors. We found that the results that we found in Table 2 remained relatively the same. Namely, we continued to see a main effect of self-compassion predicting SWB (b = .19, SE = .02, t = 9.36, 95% CI [.15, .24]) and acceptance (b = .20, SE = .04, t = 5.08, 95% CI [.12, .28]). Additionally, we saw that self-compassion also predicted reappraisal (b = .10, SE = .05, t = 2.17, 95% CI [.01, .19]). Self-compassion did not predict covid behaviors (b = .02, SE = .03, t = .56, 95% CI [−.04, .07]). In short, the results were the same regardless of including or excluding these people.

2. We explored several Nezlek articles (e.g., Nezlek et al., 2017; Nezlek, 2017, 2020) and the Bonito, Ruppel, & Keyton (2012)that Nezlek cited. We followed their suggestions and computed reliability with the following equation where p is the number of items in the scale for our COVID-19 protective behavior scale and subjective well-being. ${\alpha }_g=\frac{{\alpha }_{group}^2}{{\alpha }_{group}^2+\frac{{\alpha }_{individual}^2}{n}+\frac{{\alpha }_{item}^2}{p\ast n}}$. We found reliability of .97 for COVID-19 protective behaviors and .96 for subjective well-being.