Abstract
Against a background of scarce research into the relationship between difficulty in emotion regulation and self-compassion among bereaved populations, the aim of this study was to examine self-compassion and difficulty in emotion regulation among university students who had experienced the death of a parent (n = 150) and those who had not (n = 474). It was found that the self-compassion scores of the university students with a deceased parent were significantly lower than the scores of those with living parents. Similarly, university students whose parent had passed away had higher scores for difficulty in emotion regulation than students who had not lived through that trauma. Our results show that for university students losing a parent may be associated with less self-compassion and more difficulties in emotion regulation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Ethics approval
The Maltepe University Ethics Committee was applied to for the ethical permission for the study (Acceptance number: 28620816/335).
Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, [BNÇ]. The data are not publicly available due to the privacy of research participants.