Abstract
Many older adults experience chronic age-related stressors (e.g., life regrets or health problems) that are difficult to control and can disturb cortisol regulation. Self-compassion may buffer adverse effects of these stressful experiences on diurnal cortisol secretion in older adulthood. To examine whether self-compassion could benefit older adults’ cortisol secretion in the context of chronic and largely uncontrollable age-related stressors, 233 community-dwelling older adults reported their levels of self-compassion, age-related stressors (regret intensity, physical health problems, and functional disability), and relevant covariates. Diurnal cortisol was measured over 3 days and the average area-under-the-curve and slope were calculated. Higher levels of self-compassion were associated with lower daily cortisol levels among older adults who reported higher levels of regret intensity, physical health problems, or functional disability (βs < − .53, ps < .01), but not among their counterparts who reported lower levels of these age-related stressors (βs < .24, ps > .28). These results suggest that self-compassion may represent an important personal resource that could protect older adults from stress-related biological disturbances resulting from chronic and uncontrollable stressors.
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Notes
We note that our study also included a measure of daily perceived stress, which was assessed on 3 days and could involve both transient and addressable stressors or chronic and uncontrollable stressors. Since our theoretical approach focused on specific chronic and uncontrollable stressors, daily perceptions of stress were not considered for the study hypotheses. However, we acknowledge that supplemental analyses, using an average score of daily perceived stress, did not show significant interactions involving daily stress and self-compassion predicting cortisol level (β = − .22, p > .05) or slope (β = − .00, p > .05). In addition, there were no significant main effects of the daily stress predicting cortisol level (β = .10, p > .05) or cortisol slope (β = .00, p > .05). Further, including daily stress into the reported models as a covariate did not change any of the reported results.
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The study has been supported by awards and grants from Canadian Institutes of Health Research to Carsten Wrosch and Jean-Philippe Gouin, and a doctoral fellowship from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to Heather Herriot.
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Heather Herriot, Carsten Wrosch, and Jean-Philippe Gouin declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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All procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committees and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Herriot, H., Wrosch, C. & Gouin, JP. Self-compassion, chronic age-related stressors, and diurnal cortisol secretion in older adulthood. J Behav Med 41, 850–862 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-018-9943-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-018-9943-6