Speakers
Description
Authors: Hana Gačal (University of Zaregb Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences; University of Amsterdam), Josipa Mihić (University of Zaregb Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences; University of Amsterdam), Asmir Gračanin (University of Rijeka Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences)
Background: Self-compassion can be described as a positive attitude towards oneself in times of pain or suffering. It has been conceptualised as a multidimensional construct that contains compassionate and uncompassionate components. Since self-compassion has been recognised as one of the determinants of mental health, it is important to further explore how different dimensions of self-compassion are associated with different indicators of mental health.
Methods: The study was conducted within the project "Testing the 5C model of positive youth development: traditional and digital mobile measurement (P.R.O.T.E.C.T., UIP-2020-02-2852)" which is funded by the Croatian Science Foundation. The study aimed to examine the latent profiles of self-compassion and their associations with mental health problems. Five hundred fifty-eight university students (Mage = 21.46, SD = 4.00) participated in the study, of whom 72.40% were girls. The Self-Compassion Scale for Youth (Neff et al., 2021) was used to assess the level of self-compassion, and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995) was used to assess the adolescents’ level of depression, anxiety, and stress.
Results: Based on the results of latent profile analysis on six subscales of The Self-Compassion Scale, four latent profiles were identified: ‘Highly Compassionate’ (15.77%), ‘Highly Uncompassionate’ (14.16%), ‘Moderately Compassionate’ (32.70%) and ‘Moderately Uncompassionate’ (37.28%). The results of one-way ANOVAs revealed that individuals with higher results on the compassionate subscales tend to report fewer mental health problems compared to participants with higher results on the uncompassionate subscales.
Discussion: Findings revealed that the latent profiles on self-compassion differed in the outcomes of mental health problems, indicating the importance of self-compassion in the prevention of anxiety, depression and stress. These findings also highlight the importance of accessing different dimensions of self-compassion and not only the total score. Implications for prevention research and practice will be discussed in the presentation.
| Conflict of interest | We declare no conflict of interest. |
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