Self-compassion and attention: self-compassion facilitates disengagement from negative stimuli

Self-compassion is a healthy way of relating to the self, and helps to mitigate negative emotions during difficult experiences. Through four studies, we explored the influence of induced self-compassion on affect-biased attention (measured using a dot-probe task) among undergraduates after negative aspects of the self were made salient. We manipulated self-compassion through a writing task and compared its effects on the dot-probe task against a control (studies 1 and 2), self-esteem and emotion disclosure (study 3), and happiness condition (study 4). Prior to the self-compassion induction, feelings of inadequacies (studies 1, 3 and 4), or shame (study 2) were first elicited among participants. The self-compassion condition yielded faster negative disengaging relative to all comparison conditions across all studies. Our studies provide strong evidence that self-compassion does have an effect on automatic, antecedental emotional regulation processes, especially negative disengaging, following the experience of inadequacy, and even a more intense feeling of shame.