Self-compassion Moderated The Influence Of An Acute Psychological Stress On Compassionate Response

In recent years,the relationship between stress and prosocial behavior has received more attention from researchers.Some researchers have proposed the "tend-and_befriend" hypothesis.That is,individuals after stress to obtain social support through positive social connections to alleviate the stress and anxiety.To date,although some studies have been conducted to test the hypothesis,the available research results were inconsistent dued to the different paradigm used in those studies.Compassion as a prosocial emotion motivates prosocial behaviors oriented toward the reduction of need and suffering.Thus,it will be worthy to understand the relationship between acute stress and individual prosocial behavior by clarifying the potential effect of acute stresses on compassion.In addition,considering self-compassion as a strategy of emotional regulation,whether or not self-compassion can regulate the relationship between stress and compassion remains to be further studied.The current study included two related studies as followed:the first study is to examine the possible moderating effects of self-compassion in the relation between acute psychology stress and individuals’ compassion.The second study is to examine the role of self-compassion induced by the writing task in the relation between psychological stress and compassion.Results of the first study showed that:(1)there existed the marginally significant difference of compassionate responses between the stress group and the control group.That is,there were higher scores of compassionate responses in the stress group than the scores of the control group.(2)Under the condition of psychological stress,trait self-compassion moderated the association between RSA reactivity to the stress task and RSA reactivity to compassionate video.Whereas as for these individuals with the low level of self-compassion,stress-task-related RSA reactivity was significantly and positively related to individual RSA reactivity to compassion task,as for these individuals with the high level of self-compassion,the relationship between stress-task-related RSA reactivity and RSA reactivity to compassionate task was not significant.Results of the second study showed that:(1)There existed the marginally significant in the level of compassion between the self-compassion induced group and the control group,with the lower level of self-compassion-induced group than that of the control group.(2)The relationship between the stress-task-related RSA reactivity and the scores of compassion moderated by the level of self-compassion induced by the task.Specifically,for individuals with the low level of self-compassion,the stress-task-related RSA reactivity had a significant and negative relationship to individual’s compassion score,and for individuals with the high level of self-compassion,the stress task related reactivity had a significant and positive relationship to individual’s compassion score.(3)Under the condition of psychological stress,among individuals with the higher self-compassion in the control group,the stress-task-related RSA reactivity had a significant and positive relation to individual scores of compassion,whereas for individuals with the low level of self-compassion,the stress-task-related RSA reactivity had no significant relation to individual compassion scores.In conclusion,this study found that(1)under the condition of the acute psychological stress,individuals will exhibit more compassionate response;but these self-compassion-induced individuals exhibit less compassionate responses under the psychological stress.(2)Although self-compassion moderates the relationship between psychological stress and compassionate response,the moderated relation varies across the difference measure index’s of compassion.(3)The relationship between a psychological stress and individual compassionate response is moderated by the inducing self-compassion status.