Congratulations to graduate student, Ali Tracy and her collaborators who published their paper titled, “The effects of inducing self-compassion on affective and physiological recovery from a psychosocial stressor in depression.”
The current study tested whether self-compassion facilitates faster affective and physiological recovery from stress. Participants (N = 59) experiencing elevated depressive symptoms completed the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and then were randomly assigned to either a self-compassion induction or a no-strategy control induction. Participants in the self-compassion condition exhibited a greater increase in positive affect than did participants in the no-strategy control condition. However, changes in respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) levels did not differ between participants in the self-compassion and no-strategy control condition. These results suggest that, among individuals with elevated depressive symptoms, brief self-compassion inductions have short-term beneficial psychological, but not physiological, effects.
Read the full paper here.