Abstract
Psychologists tend to report high levels of occupational stress, with serious implications for themselves, their clients, and the discipline as a whole. Recent research suggests that self-compassion is a promising construct for psychologists in terms of its ability to promote psychological wellbeing and resilience to stress; however, the potential benefits of self-compassion are yet to be thoroughly explored amongst this occupational group. Additionally, while a growing body of research supports self-compassion as a key predictor of psychopathology, understanding of the processes by which self-compassion exerts effects on mental health outcomes is limited. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to test an emotion regulation model of self-compassion and stress among psychologists, including postgraduate trainees undertaking clinical work (n = 198). Self-compassion significantly negatively predicted emotion regulation difficulties and stress symptoms. Support was also found for our preliminary explanatory model of self-compassion, which demonstrates the mediating role of emotion regulation difficulties in the self-compassion-stress relationship. The final self-compassion model accounted for 26.2% of variance in stress symptoms. Implications of the findings and limitations of the study are discussed.
Highlights
Effective stress management has been identified as an ethical imperative among psychologists, with evidence that as many as 40–73% of trainee and professional psychologists report “caseness” levels of distress [1,2,3]
Stress among psychologists has been linked with a range of negative outcomes, including self-esteem difficulties [4], depression and anxiety [5, 6], secondary traumatic stress [7, 8], compassion fatigue [9,10,11], and vicarious traumatization (e.g., [7, 12, 13])
Based on initial evidence that self-compassion shares strong, negative links with emotion regulation difficulties [65, 78], which, may in turn impact stress [47] and other symptoms of psychopathology [52], the present study examined the mediating role of emotion regulation difficulties in the relationship between self-compassion and stress symptoms
Summary
Effective stress management has been identified as an ethical imperative among psychologists, with evidence that as many as 40–73% of trainee and professional psychologists report “caseness” levels of distress [1,2,3]. Self-Compassion and Stress among Australian Psychologists clients [16,17,18]. In light of these findings, there has been a call for the development of initiatives that promote stress resilience and wellbeing among psychologists in a positive, integrated, and sustainable way [19, 20]. Mindfulness-based interventions have received growing attention in this regard [20,21,22], and programs such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) have been found to decrease stress, negative affect, self-doubt and anxiety amongst trainee psychologists and allied health professionals [2, 23, 24]. Self-compassion has been identified as a key target variable in this line of work (e.g., [2, 21, 23, 24, 25]), with some researchers proposing that self-compassion is a central mechanism by which mindfulness- and acceptance-based interventions impact psychological health [26,27,28]
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