Self-compassion and psychological well-being among adolescents in Hong Kong: Exploring gender differences

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.06.011Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Self-compassion contributed to Hong Kong adolescents' psychological well-being.

  • Boys and girls benefited from different self-compassion components.

  • Mindfulness was most beneficial for boys' psychological well-being.

  • Common humanity was most salutary for girls' psychological well-being.

Abstract

The present study examined the relationship between self-compassion components and psychological well-being (PWB) in a group of Hong Kong adolescents (aged 12 to 16, N = 277). In general, girls held overall higher PWB than boys. Except for autonomy and self-acceptance, girls reported higher scores on other dimensions of PWB. In addition, girls and boys shared similar profiles of self-compassion components, with boys manifesting higher isolation than girls. More importantly, self-compassion components facilitated PWB following different pathways for boys and girls. Boys benefited maximally from mindfulness, which revealed significant positive effects on their autonomy, purpose in life, environmental mastery, and personal growth. Girls benefited most from common humanity, which had positive effects on their autonomy, environmental mastery, positive relations with others and personal growth. These findings extended our understanding of self-compassion in terms of the downstream effects of its individual components, and implicated the importance of integrating gender specificity into self-compassion intervention programs.

Introduction

Recently there have been increased calls to apply positive psychology in schools and youth-oriented settings (Clonan, Chafouleas, McDougal, & Riley-Tillman, 2004). On the one hand, teaching positive psychology concepts to young people can equip them with skills and knowledge that may have a lasting positive impact on their lives. On the other hand, positive psychology has made important progress in the investigation of strengths, well-being, and happiness (Diener, Lucas, & Scollon, 2006) with adults. It is a time to extend application of such knowledge to adolescents. Especially in Hong Kong, research with adolescents showed pronounced unbalance. Vast majority of research has focused on psychopathology such as suicidal ideation (Lam et al., 2004), there lacks research on well-being and its contributory factors. Considering the absence of malfunction does not necessarily equate with psychological flourish (Keyes, 2009), our current research aimed to directly investigate adolescents' well-being from perspectives of positive psychology and throw light on the design and implementation of programs promoting adolescents' well-being in Hong Kong. To this end, we adopted Ryff's (1989) psychological well-being (PWB) and Neff, 2003a, Neff, 2003b self-compassion, investigating how self-compassion, as character strength, contributed to different aspects of PWB.

Ryff's psychological well-being (Ryff, 1989) is a framework developed to investigate individuals' eudaimonic well-being. Following the eudaimonic tradition, psychological well-being identifies six dimensions, namely, autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relation with others, purpose in life, and self-acceptance, to represent what it means to be psychologically flourishing at one's maximum potential. From those specific components, we can see that Ryff's framework, differing from other hedonic well-being indicators, takes personal development and self-realization as the fundamental elements in defining well-being. This framework is thus suitable for investigating adolescents' positive functioning, since one of the most important themes at this stage is personal growth. Moreover, psychological well-being has also been found to be positively related to many other facets of individual functioning such as biological health and hedonic well-being, and negatively to maladaptive functioning (Ryff & Singer, 1996). It is thus important to identify factors contributing to adolescents' psychological well-being.

However, adolescence is a stage during which specific risk factors for psychological well-being may emerge. Notably, cognitive and socio-emotional developments could promote adolescents to relate to themselves and the world in increasingly complex and sophisticated ways. This change makes them become self-conscious, especially of their successes and setbacks (e.g., Rankin, Lane, Gibbons, & Gerrard, 2004), and tend to incorporate failures into their self-appraisals, resulting in self-criticism and exaggeration of their feelings (Neff, 2009). These negative orientations may impair adolescents' well-being to a large extent. As such, contributing factors that are most predictive of psychological well-being may be those that can effectively help adolescents buffer against those negative tendencies. This is why we specify how self-compassion facilitated adolescents' psychological well-being in our study.

Self-compassion is defined as the ability to turn compassion inward and hold one's feelings of suffering with a sense of warmth, connection and concern (Neff, 2003a). In detail, self-compassion is comprised of self-kindness, mindfulness, and common humanity. Self-kindness refers to offering oneself warmth and nonjudgmental understanding. Common humanity refers to recognizing that imperfections and adversities are unavoidable parts of the shared human experience. Mindfulness refers to taking a balanced approach to, instead of suppressing or exaggerating, painful feelings. In developing a measurement tool, Neff (2003b) also introduced self-judgment, isolation and over-identification to assess these three components, resulting in the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS) consisting of six subscales.

Conceptually, self-compassionate individuals, holding health attitude toward selves, should be less likely to develop those negative orientations. Empirically, self-compassion can prevent individuals from pathological symptoms such as anxiety and depression (e.g., Pauley & McPherson, 2010). Besides, self-compassion benefited various aspects of positive functioning, serving as strong predictors of hedonic forms of well-being characterized by subjective happiness (Hollis-Walker and Colosimo, 2011, Neff et al., 2007), positive affect (Neff & Vonk, 2009) and life satisfaction (Allen & Leary, 2010). Though these findings were primarily obtained with adults, there was at least one previous study that reported positive effects of self-compassion on hedonic forms of well-being among adolescents (e.g., Neff & McGehee, 2010). Based on these evidences and the fact that psychological well-being is not completely independent of hedonic well-being (Ryan & Deci, 2000), positive association can be expected between adolescents' self-compassion and psychological well-being.

It is still less straightforward to see whether boys and girls equally benefit from being self-compassionate, since previous research obtained mixed results regarding gender differences in self-compassion. While some found females reported lower self-compassion than males (Neff, 2003a, Neff and McGehee, 2010), others did not obtain significant results (Neff et al., 2008, Yang, 2016). Because of the application of comprehensive score rather than subscale scores of Self-Compassion Scale in those studies, it is hard to locate the sources for such disparity (Yarnell et al., 2015). Yet one potential factor leading to the inconsistent findings may be gender-specific socialization, which exerts opposite effects on different dimensions of self-compassion. For example, the socialization girls experience emphasizes self-sacrifice to satisfy the needs of others over their own, which may impair girls' ability in treating themselves with self-kindness and thus result in low level of self-compassion. Meanwhile, socialization for girls places importance on development of tender qualities such as tranquilizing and smoothing (Raffaelli & Ontai, 2004), which can be readily employed by girls in experiencing sufferings and thus increase their self-compassion.

The gender issue may become more complicated under a non-western cultural context. In particular, high level of interdependent self-construal (Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto, & Norasakkunkit, 1997) in Eastern culture may have differential implications for females and males in terms of the relationships between self-compassion components and psychological well-being. For one thing, such self-view implies great importance of human interconnectedness (Kitayama & Markus, 2000), which may encourage common humanity. Being more aware of and affected by interpersonal processes (Acitelli, 1992), females may benefit more from high level of common humanity in the social context. In addition, high interdependent self-construal may promote social conformity, requiring harsh self-regulatory strategies (Kitayama et al., 1997). Self-criticism, which enables clear awareness of one's deficits and thus facilitates self-improvement efforts (e.g., Heine, 2003), may become a more adaptive factor for males, since they are more dominant than women (Suh, Moskowitz, Fournier, & Zuroff, 2004) and may be more inclined to integrate self-criticism into their self-regulatory processes. Hence, self-judgment, rather than being negative to self-kindness, is expected to be a positive factor for males in Asia.

We brought together psychological well-being and self-compassion as a way of understanding adolescents' positive functioning. We expected high levels of common humanity and self-judgment for girls and boys respectively under the Asian cultural setting. With the notion that socio-cultural contexts influence differentially the specific facets of self-compassion, we used subscale scores, instead of merging them into one comprehensive score. Conducting separate analyses for girls and boys, we aimed to delineate gender-differentiated pathways from self-compassion to psychological well-being: while self-kindness and common humanity may be most relevant to girls, self-judgment may appear more prominent for boys.

Section snippets

Participants and procedures

A total of 277 adolescents attending secondary school voluntarily participated in this study. These students were aged 12 to 16 (M = 14.23, SD = 1.35, Mode of age is 14.00). Among them, 144 (52.0%) were boys. Participants completed the questionnaires anonymously in the classroom environment. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants and their guardians prior to the assessment session.

Self-Compassion Scale (SCS)

Participants' self-compassion was assessed by the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS; Neff, 2003b)

Factorial validity of self-compassion and psychological well-being

To begin with, we validated the factorial structures of self-compassion and psychological well-being. All CFA analyses were conducted on Mplus 6.1 (Muthén & Muthén, 2010). To determine model fit, we followed the recommendation by Kline (2011) and included the chi-square test, the CFI (comparative fit index), the RMSEA (root mean square error of approximation) paired with its 90% CI (confidence interval), and the SRMR (standardized root mean square residual). Models were considered to attain

Discussion

The current study added to the stream of research focusing on well-being of adolescents and is the first attempt to extend the positive effect of self-compassion to eudaimonic well-being of adolescents. On the whole, adolescents in our study demonstrated favorable well-being. They all showed strong endorsement for dimensions of psychological well-being. More importantly, self-compassion components were contributive to adolescents' psychological well-being, through gender-differentiated pathways.

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