Protection as the Mirror Image of Psychopathology: Further Critical Notes on the Self-Compassion Scale

Abstract

Self-compassion can be defined as the tendency to be caring, warm, and understanding towards oneself when faced with personal shortcomings, problems, or failures. Kristin Neff certainly should be applauded for her seminal work on self-compassion. That is, she was the first putting this self-related construct on the scientific agenda and publishing a considerable amount of theoretical and empirical articles on this topic. From the start, Neff (2003a) has persisted in a conceptualization of self-compassion mainly drawn from writings of Buddhist teachers, postulating that the construct essentially consists of three core components. The first component is self-kindness and refers to the tendency to be kind to and understanding with oneself when confronted with personal disappointments. The second component is common humanity, which deals with recognizing that one’s failures and problems are an integral part of human life. The third and final component is mindfulness and relates to the ability of not becoming too absorbed with personal problems but rather to keep a balanced view on the positive and negative experiences in life. Self-compassion nicely fits within the current positive psychology trend, because it can be regarded as a protective factor that fosters resilience in the face of adversity and stress. Indeed, studies on self-compassion are steadily increasing, especially in the field of clinical psychology and psychiatry. In general, this work indicates that higher levels of selfcompassion are associated with lower levels of anxiety and depression (MacBeth and Gumley 2012) as well as a wide variety of other psychopathological symptoms (e.g., posttraumatic stress, psychosis, addiction, disruptive behavior, and eating problems; Muris and Petrocchi 2016). Researchers mainly rely on Neff’s invented (2003b) SelfCompassion Scale (SCS) or its abbreviated version, the SelfCompassion Scale-Short Form (SCS-SF; Raes et al. 2011), for measuring this construct. The SCS contains 26 items, half of which directly measure the three core components of selfkindness (e.g., BI’m kind to myself when I’m experiencing suffering^), common humanity (e.g., BI try to see my failings as part of the human condition^), and mindfulness (e.g., BWhen something upsets me I try to keep my emotions in balance^). The other half of items intend to tap the dimensional counterparts of the three key components and assess selfjudgment (e.g., BWhen times are really difficult, I tend to be tough on myself^), isolation (e.g., BWhen I fail at something that is important to me, I tend to feel alone in my failure^), and over-identification (e.g., BWhen something upsets me, I get carried away by my feelings^). However, Neff (2003b) already found in the initial psychometric study that the three hypothesized dimensions (i.e., self-kindness versus self-judgment, common humanity versus isolation, and mindfulness versus over-identification) did not exist, and from then on, it became gradually accepted that the SCS contains six subscales, with three subscales being positive indicators and three subscales being negative indicators of the self-compassion construct. Researchers using the SCS frequently neglect this important issue and only compute a total SCS score by summing the ratings across all items (after reversing the ratings on negative indicator items; see Lopez et al. 2015). On a brief * Peter Muris peter.muris@maastrichtuniversity.nl