Meg deCordre'

Date of Award

2011

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Graham, Steven

Keywords

Social Awareness, Self Compassion, Social Relationships, Satisfaction, Social Perspective-Taking

Area of Concentration

Psychology

Abstract

Self-compassion is a recently proposed construct based in Buddhist philosophy which represents fostering a warm and comforting attitude towards those aspects of oneself and one's life that are disliked. The current studies examined self-compassion from within the context of two distinct forms of social awareness styles: �imagine other� and �imagine self.� Two studies used the Self-Compassion Scale (Neff, 2003a) to examine self-compassion�s association with social awareness style, attribution-making, and perceived satisfaction in relationships. For the first study, perspective-taking was assessed using the Social Awareness Inventory (Sheldon, 1996). In a second study, participants were placed in either a imagine other, imagine self, or objective perspective-taking condition and were instructed to write about a time they witnessed a peer experience a negative event. In opposition to the hypothesis, social awareness style was not related to self-compassion. In line with the expected results, however, self-compassion was related to relationship satisfaction. Additionally, common humanity, a main constituent of self-compassion, was found to be associated with both the imagine other perspective-taking style as well as satisfaction in social relationships.

Download

Share

COinS