Using multiple character strengths to inform young adults’ self-compassion: The potential of hope and forgiveness

ABSTRACT

Self-compassion is an adaptive means of relating to the self during times of distress. Character strengths include a set of traits and values that ultimately uplift the self and others. Although self-compassion is known to be associated with multiple character strengths, there remain opportunities to address whether particular strengths uniquely inform individual differences in self-compassion. Using three studies, strengths of curiosity, grit, gratitude, hope, and forgiveness were considered to determine which strengths provided unique information for reports of self-compassion. Results showed that hope and forgiveness were robustly associated with self-compassion when these strengths were studied simultaneously (Studies 1 and 2) and alongside Big Five covariates (Study 2). Study 3 showed that the effects of hope and forgiveness on self-compassion were comparable between college- and community-recruited young adults. Overall, findings suggest that hope and forgiveness may be promising targets to further understand, and ultimately promote, self-compassion.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-Compassion
• hope
• forgiveness
• young Adulthood

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at DOI:10.17605/OSF.IO/TPA6U.

Notes

1. For these fit indices, RMSEA < .08, TLI > .09, and relatively lower BIC values indicate stronger model fit (Hu & Bentler, 1999).

2. In a follow-up model, invariance was also tested between women and men. There was not support for significant variance in structural effects given gender, ps = .191 – .702.

Additional information

Funding

This work was not funded externally.