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Abstract
Self-compassion involves treating oneself kindly, acknowledging that all humans experience suffering, and maintaining a balanced awareness of negative thoughts and feelings. Three studies (N = 614) examined the potential role of self-compassion in response to interpersonal rejection. Study 1 recruited a large, diverse internet sample and explored relationships between general perceived acceptance and several outcome variables (affect, depression, self-esteem), testing whether self-compassion moderates these relationships. Similarly, Study 2 tested whether self-compassion moderates the relationships between daily acceptance/rejection and outcome variables. Finally, Study 3 tested whether a self-compassion manipulation effectively promotes coping with rejection. Taken together, results reveal that self-compassion both predicts (Studies 1 and 2) and promotes (Study 3) relatively adaptive responses to rejection. These results suggest that a self-compassionate mindset may lessen the sting of rejection.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Nancy Frye for her comments on an earlier version of this paper and Allie Britten, Jessie Doyle, Ashley Francis, Chris Lively, and Sara MacDonald for their assistance in data collection. I also thank Derrick Lee for his statistics guidance. Selected results of this research were presented at the 2015 SELF conference in Kiel, Germany, and at the 2019 meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) in Portland, Oregon.
Data availability
Data for all studies are available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/pbdvx/?view_only=ca9f43c4cd9e4df291dd2362774341a6.
Notes
Notes
1 At the request of an anonymous reviewer, I also examined whether the pattern of results differed when creating separate subscales for the negative (α = 0.85) and positive (α = 0.78) self-compassion items. The pattern of results did not differ substantially (although, the descriptive difference between slopes was more pronounced for the negative items), consistent with recent research supporting the superiority of models treating self-compassion as a single factor (Neff et al., Citation2019).
2 For exploratory purposes, Study 3 also included two items assessing whether participants believed that they had learned anything (Zhang & Chen, Citation2016) from their rejection experience. Because these two items did not correlate highly with each other and did not yield notable effects, I do not discuss them further.