The relation of early positive emotional memories to women’s social safeness: The role of shame and fear of receiving compassion

ABSTRACT

Early affiliative experiences play an important role in social and emotional development. Several authors have suggested that early positive experiences may be recorded as memories of warmth and soothing. However, the relationship between such memories and current feelings of social safeness and connectedness remains scarcely studied. The current study examined the association between recall of early positive affiliative experiences (with family and peers) and women’s social safeness. External shame and fear of others’ compassion were hypothesized to be mediators in these associations. The sample was recruited from October 2016 to February 2016 and included 400 women from the Portuguese population, aged between 18 and 55 years. The path model explained 52% of the variance of social safeness. Early positive affiliative memories (with family and peers) were associated with a lower tendency to fear receiving others’ compassion and to feel ashamed, which seemed to be associated with an increased sense of social safeness. These findings offer pertinent insights for future studies in and interventions for women´s well-being and mental health by highlighting the importance of addressing shame and fears of compassion when working with women who tend to perceive their social world as unsafe and others’ compassion as threatening.

KEYWORDS:

• Early affiliative memories
• external shame
• fear of compassion
• social safeness

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.