On the Edge of Psychopathology: Strong Relations Between Reversed Self-compassion and Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression in Young People

Abstract

Self-compassion is assumed to have a protective role in the etiology of emotional problems in adolescents. This assumption is primarily based on correlational data revealing negative correlations between the total score on the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS) and symptom measures of anxiety and depression. Recently, however, the SCS has been criticized because this scale not only consists of items measuring compassionate self-responding (i.e., self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness), but also includes 'reversed' items measuring uncompassionate self-responding (i.e., self-criticism, isolation, and overidentification), which would undermine the validity of the scale as an index of a protective construct. The present article used two methods to demonstrate that compassionate (positive) and uncompassionate (negative) self-responding have differential effects on emotional problems in youths. In the first part, a meta-analysis based on 16 relevant studies demonstrated a modest protective effect of positive self-compassion on anxiety/depression and a large (and significantly stronger) vulnerability effect of negative self-compassion on such emotional symptoms. In the second part, network analyses were conducted on three previously collected data sets and these analyses again showed that negative self-compassion is more closely connected to young people's symptoms of anxiety and depression than positive self-compassion. It is argued that the observed differential effects should not be discarded as a subversive fallacy, but rather offer an opportunity for studying the role of self-compassion in adolescents' emotional psychopathology in a more sophisticated way, taking into account both protection and vulnerability.

Keywords: Adolescents; Anxiety and depression; Compassionate and uncompassionate self-responding; Self-compassion.

Fig. 1

PRISMA flow diagram depicting the selection of articles that were included in the meta-analysis of the relations between positive and negative self-compassion components and anxiety/depression in young people

Fig. 2

Results of the network analysis exploring the relations among positive and negative self-compassion components and emotional psychopathology in three data sets, relying on different variants of the SCS. A. Estimated network structures with orange nodes for self-compassion components, light blue nodes for anxiety, green nodes for depression, blue edges for positive relationships, and red edges for negative relationships. B. Strength centrality for various nodes in the three models; higher values indicate that a node is more strongly connected to other nodes. Note. Sample sizes were N = 130 for Study 1, N = 106 for Study 2, and N = 87 for Study 3. SCS = Self-Compassion Scale, SCS-SF = Self-Compassion Scale–Short Form, SCS-Y = Self-Compassion Scale for Youth. STAI = Spielberger Trait Anxiety Inventory, YAM = Youth Anxiety Measure, CDI = Children’s Depression Inventory, CH = common humanity, M = Mindfulness, SK = self-kindness, SJ = self-judgment, I = isolation, OI = overidentification