Abstract
The present study examined how people with compassionate goals cope with the threat of social rejection. Specifically, we tested whether self-compassion mediates the associations between compassionate goals and adaptive responses in the wake of social rejection. Participants (n = 358) first filled out the measure of compassionate goals and then described their personal experience of being rejected by others in their life. Later, they reported their levels of self-compassionate reactions toward their experience, fundamental need satisfaction, and revenge intention toward the rejecter. A path model showed that self-compassionate reactions mediated the relations of compassionate goals to higher satisfaction of fundamental needs, B = 0.170, 95%CI [0.062, 0.273], and lower revenge intention, B = −0.077, 95%CI [−0.164, −0.027]. These mediation pathways remained significant for current need satisfaction, B = 0.196, 95%CI [0.089, 0.290], and revenge intention, B = −0.079, 95%CI [−0.161, −0.029], even after controlling for the characteristics of rejection experiences. This study highlights that people who pursue compassionate goals would likely engage in self-compassion to cope with social rejection and thus maintain greater intra-and interpersonal well-being.
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Data Availability
The datasets for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.
Notes
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Self-compassion reflects both levels of relatively stable individual differences and event-specific coping strategies (Allen & Leary, 2010; Neff, 2011). Regardless of these levels, self-compassion links to positive psychological functioning (Allen & Leary, 2010; Neff, 2011). Therefore, throughout this paper, we use the terms “self-compassion” and “self-compassionate reactions” interchangeably. Note, however, that we specifically refer to “self-compassionate reactions” when people use self-compassion as a coping strategy to negative events (Allen & Leary, 2010), including social rejection.
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Participants reported their rejection experiences such as being ignored, spoken ill of, teased, and isolated. Whereas some participants (23.5%) did not indicate who was their rejector, the common reported experience was social rejection that happened in their workplace (23.7%), their close friendships (19.0%), and their relationships with classmates (17.3%).
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Our work was funded by Collaborative Project Research Grant from Otemon Gakuin University.
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This research has been approved by the Institutional Review Board of the affiliated university of the first author. All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. The datasets for this study are available on request to the corresponding author.
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Miyagawa, Y., Niiya, Y. & Taniguchi, J. Compassionate goals and responses to social rejection: A mediating role of self-compassion. Curr Psychol 42, 10683–10692 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02345-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02345-8