OBJECTIVES The clinical significance of self-criticism and self-compassion has prompted the development of questionnaires assessing these constructs. However, there is a lack of measures assessing their interaction within specific contexts and potential involvement in mood repair processes. DESIGN To rectify this, we developed the Self-Compassion and Self-Criticism Scales (SCCS), based on res...

Self-compassion, which refers to the tendency of being kind and understanding to oneself when confronted with personal failings and difficulties, is increasingly investigated as a protective factor within the context of mental health problems. In this invited paper, I will briefly introduce the concept of self-compassion and give an overview of the research that has examined its relationship wi...

Parents of children with autism are faced with difficult and unique daily stressors associated with their child’s disorder. The personal characteristics of parents can influence how they approach stressful life events and potentially help them cope with some of the deleterious effects associated with extreme stress. One factor that may be an important coping strategy is self-compassion, which i...

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programmes have demonstrated benefi cial outcomes in a variety of populations. Self-compassion and empathy have theoretical connections to mindfulness, the key element of the MBSR programme; however, previous studies examining the programme’s impact on self-compassion or empathy have demonstrated mixed results. This study examined the impact of MBSR on ...

how to instill compassion in a healthcare organization? in this article, i respond to marianna fotaki’s proposals in her piece, ‘why and how is compassion necessary to provide good quality healthcare?’ by drawing on insights from organization studies. following fotaki, i argue that to instill targets and formal measures for assessing compassion would be problematic. i conclude by drawing on psy...

The present paper introduces elements for conceiving ethics for all beings based on the idea of laic compassion.

Empathy, feeling what others feel, is regarded as a special phenomenon that is separate from other emotional experiences. Emotion theories say little about feeling emotions for others and empathy theories say little about how feeling emotions for others relates to normal firsthand emotional experience. Current empathy theories focus on how we feel emotions for others who feel the same thing, bu...

An optimistic learning bias leads people to update their beliefs in response to better-than-expected good news but neglect worse-than-expected bad news. Because evidence suggests that this bias arises from self-concern, we hypothesized that a similar bias may affect beliefs about other people's futures, to the extent that people care about others. Here, we demonstrated the phenomenon of vicario...

BACKGROUND Emergency rescue personnel can be considered a "high risk" occupational group in that they could experience a broad range of health and mental health consequences as a result of work-related exposures to critical incidents. OBJECTIVES This study examined the resilience factors that protect mental health among first responders. METHODS Nine hundred and sixty-one first responders f...

This study examined neural activation during the experience of compassion, an emotion that orients people toward vulnerable others and prompts caregiving, and pride, a self-focused emotion that signals individual strength and heightened status. Functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) were acquired as participants viewed 55 s continuous sequences of slides to induce either compassion or prid...