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 five studies, I explored the influence of trait and induced self-compassion on affect-biased attention (measured using a dot-probe task) among undergraduates after negative aspects of the self were made salient. Study 1 demonstrated that trait self-compassion was associated with faster orienting toward positive stimuli and faster disengagement away from negative stimuli. Studies 2 to 5 manipulated self-compassion through a writing task, and compared its effects on the dot-probe task against a control condition (studies 2 and 3), self-esteem and emotion disclosure conditions (study 4), and happiness condition (study 5). Prior to the self-compassion induction, feelings of inadequacies (studies 1, 2, 4 and 5), or shame (study 3) were first elicited among participants. The self-compassion condition yielded faster negative disengaging relative to all comparison conditions across all studies, and faster positive orienting compared to the control and emotion disclosure conditions only. Taken together, my studies provide strong evidence that self-compassion does have an effect on automatic, antecedental emotional processes, especially negative disengaging, following the experience of a sense of inadequacy, and even a more intense feeling of shame.