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Self-Compassion, Self-Injury, and Pain

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Abstract

We conducted an experiment to examine self-compassion and responses to pain among undergraduate women with and without histories of self-injury. After a writing task that has been shown to increase self-compassion in a values-affirming condition relative to a neutral control condition, participants completed a self-report measure of state self-compassion and the cold pressor task. As predicted, participants with a history of self-injury reported lower trait self-compassion than those without such a history, and participants in the values-affirming condition reported significantly higher state self-compassion than those in the control condition. Moreover, participants with a history of self-injury demonstrated significantly less insensitivity to pain in the values-affirming condition than the control condition. Future research should investigate the possibility that interventions involving self-compassion and/or affirmation of values may help correct high-risk responses to pain among those who self-injure.

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Notes

  1. In addition, we excluded four male participants who were accidently recruited for this study of women, and three other participants for whom the water temperature was outside the required 6°–8° temperature range due to a miscommunication of experimenter instructions.

  2. After one participant spontaneously remarked that regular ice baths were a required part of her athletic training, we started asking all participants about their use of ice baths after they had completed the study.

  3. Compassion is a complex but positive state, so it is not surprising that the words used to assess it overlap with positive feelings. Nevertheless, because one item in our state self-compassion scale (‘joyful’) stands out from the others for its connotations of pleasure, we conducted supplementary analyses to evaluate the role that this item played in the previous results. First, we repeated our analyses of state self-compassion while omitting the ‘joyful’ item, and found the same significant effect of condition, F(1, 60) = 6.33, p = .015, d = 0.63. Then, we added ‘joyful’ as a covariate, and found that the effect of condition was no longer significant, F(1, 59) = 0.19, p = .667, d = 0.11. These analyses suggest that the values-affirmation manipulation had a significant effect on state self-compassion even when no words reflecting simple positive affect were included in our state self-compassion scale. Nevertheless, state self-compassion after the manipulation was clearly associated with pleasurable feelings, and we are unable to demonstrate that effects on self-compassion occurred independent of effects on these feelings.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Gettysburg College funding for senior projects (to Gregory) and by a Research and Professional Development grant from Gettysburg College (to Berenson). We thank to Jessica C. Johnson, Sarah M. Van De Weert and Fanghui Zhao for their assistance with data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology Department, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA, 17325, USA

    Wesley Ellen Gregory, Jillian V. Glazer & Kathy R. Berenson

  2. Psychology Department, The New School for Social Research, New York, NY, 10011, USA

    Wesley Ellen Gregory

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  1. Wesley Ellen Gregory
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  2. Jillian V. Glazer
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  3. Kathy R. Berenson
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Correspondence to Kathy R. Berenson.

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Wesley Ellen Gregory, Jillian V. Glazer, and Kathy R. Berenson declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee 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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Gregory, W.E., Glazer, J.V. & Berenson, K.R. Self-Compassion, Self-Injury, and Pain. Cogn Ther Res 41, 777–786 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-017-9846-9

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