College Students’ Self-compassion, Personality, Coping Styles And Helping Behaviors

Self-compassion is an emerging field of psychological research, a large numberof findings show that it has great important significance in increasing individualhappiness and creating a positive and healthy life. The study aims at exploring thecharacteristics of college students’ self-compassion and the relationships amongself-compassion, personality, coping styles and helping behaviors, so that providingsome scientific references for college students’ self-healthy growth, coping abilityimprovement and better integration into the society.In order to comprehensively understand the self-compassion implication andthe relation between it and individual behaviors, this study collected data from twoperspectives of individual trait and state, based on summarizing the domestic andabroad documents of self-compassion researches so far. Using experiment researchand investigation,918graduate and undergraduate students from3universities wererandomly chosen as the participants, five study instruments were employed in thepaper: Undergraduates’ Self-compassion Questionnaire, NEO-PI-R, Coping StyleRating Scale, SES and hypothetical scenarios. The main conclusions are follows:The survey including611objects shows, in the whole, the college students’self-compassion is characteristic evidently by major, there is no significant differencebetween gender and grade, but the effect is statically significant in some dimensions.As a whole, self-compassion is significantly positive correlation with the activecoping style: solves problem and asks for help; contrary, college students’self-compassion is significantly negative correlation with the passive coping style:self-blame, withdraw, fantasy, and rationalization.Self-compassion and neuroticism personality exist high negatively correlation,whereas self-compassion and other personality factors show a significantly positivecorrelation.Based on the hypothesis model, self-blame played a mediated role betweenself-compassion and personality.State self-compassion which can be induced by experiment conditions is positively related to helping behaviors.It is self-compassion, rather than self-esteem, that will predict helping behaviorsignificantly.