Protection versus risk? The relative roles of compassionate and uncompassionate self-responding for eating disorder behaviors

Research demonstrates the protective role of self-compassion for eating disorder symptoms. However, studies investigating self-compassion most often use the Self-Compassion Scale, which aggregates the distinct but related constructs of compassionate and uncompassionate self-responding. This study examined differential associations of compassionate and uncompassionate self-responding with positive and negative affect and with a range of eating disorder behaviors (i.e., binge eating, purging, dietary restriction, and excessive exercise). Participants were 547 undergraduate students (59% women, Mage = 20.49, SDage = 1.83) who completed measures of self-compassion, trait affect, and eating disorder behaviors. Compassionate and uncompassionate self-responding were moderately negatively correlated (rs = -0.41 and -0.33, among women and men, respectively). Compassionate self-responding was more strongly related to positive affect, and uncompassionate self-responding was more strongly related to negative affect. Among women, uncompassionate self-responding was related to all eating disorder behaviors controlling for compassionate self-responding, whereas compassionate self-responding was not uniquely related to any eating disorder behavior. Among men, a similar pattern emerged, except that only compassionate self-responding related uniquely to excessive exercise. Results are consistent with studies showing that the presence of uncompassionate self-responding might outweigh the absence of compassionate self-responding in explaining psychopathology. Findings highlight the potential importance of primarily targeting uncompassionate self-responding in eating disorder interventions.