Publications
The associations between self-compassion and adult attachment: A meta-analysis
Self-compassion, the capacity to hold a compassionate attitude towards oneself without self-criticism when in distress, has been conceptualized to originate from receiving secure caregiving. Attachment theory offers a framework to explain self-compassion as effective coping with resources from healthy activation of the attachment system. Recent research has increasingly explored the connections between self-compassion and attachment security.
Our meta-analysis seeks to consolidate existing evidence by statistically synthesizing findings on the relationship between self-compassion and the two dimensions of attachment: anxiety and avoidance. A systematic literature search was conducted, and based on the inclusion criteria, the authors found data from 46 studies with a total size of 17,650 participants. Inclusion criteria were peer-reviewed journals and dissertations published in English that used quantitative and validated methods to measure attachment and self-compassion in participants aged 16 years and older.
We found robust negative correlations between self-compassion and both attachment anxiety (r = −.42) and avoidance (r = −.32), with age significantly moderating the relationship between avoidance and self-compassion. Subscale analyses suggested that each of the six components of self-compassion is significantly associated with attachment insecurity. The results highlight the robust associations between self-compassion and adult attachment, as well as significant associations between the individual components of self-compassion and adult attachment. Additionally, age emerges as a potentially influential moderator. Future research should further examine the causal mechanism of these associations and include correlations for self-compassion’s individual dimensions.
Self-Transcendence or Self-Enhancement: People's Perceptions of Meaning and Happiness in Relation to the Self
We all desire to have meaningful experiences in life, but what factors give rise to perceptions of meaning? Across 7 preregistered studies (total N = 1362), we examined the role of self-transcendence (i.e., benefits to society) and self-enhancement (i.e., benefits to the self) in people’s judgments of meaning, in comparison to their judgments of happiness.
We found that people weighed benefits to society more heavily than benefits to the self when evaluating the meaning of different jobs (Study 1), other people’s lives (Study 2a), and advice given to others (Study 2b). In contrast, benefits to the self were weighed similarly to (Studies 1-2) or even more heavily than benefits to society (Study 3) in people’s judgments about happiness, suggesting people’s meaning judgment is more self-transcendent than happiness judgment.
Similar differences between meaning and happiness were found in participants’ first-party perceptions of their own jobs (Study 4), advice intended to improve their own lives (Study 5), and actual feelings of completing a behavioral task (Study 7), except that self-enhancement played a relatively bigger role in first-party judgments than in third-party judgments (Studies 4-6). The results consistently suggest that self-transcendence plays a relatively more important role in meaning perceptions than in happiness perceptions (Studies 1-7). Our findings help illuminate the social cognitive processes underlying people’s perceptions of meaning, as well as shed light on the similarities and differences between our conceptualizations of meaning and happiness.