Don't be so hard on yourself: Does daily self-compassion increase emotion regulation efficacy and improve mental health?

Self-compassion is a stance taken toward the self involving mindfulness, self-kindness and an awareness of the common human experience of suffering. Research has shown that self-compassion is meaningfully related to positive mental health outcomes, and that practicing self-compassion is a skill that can be learned over a relatively short period of time and through fairly simple interventions (Albertson, Neff, & Dill-Shackleford, 2014; Shapira & Mongrain, 2010). Emotion regulation efficacy refers to a person’s beliefs about their ability to handle strong emotions. The current study tested the hypothesis that practicing self-compassion would lead to increased emotion regulation efficacy and decreased fear of emotion, as well as improved outcomes on measures of psychological distress. Participants engaged in either daily self-compassion practice or a control condition for one week while concurrently measuring daily affect and rumination, and subsequently assessing overall changes in emotion regulation efficacy, fear of emotion and mental health outcomes including stress, anxiety and depression. Contrary to predicted outcomes, participant scores on main dependent measures did not change significantly from pre- to post-intervention, and condition did not predict change in scores. Though main hypotheses were not supported, post-hoc exploratory analyses yielded some notable results.