‘Instead of Life in Prison, it Was Life in My Own Skin’: Scope and Limitations of a Week-Long Daily Online Self-Compassionate Writing Intervention for Young Women’s Body Image
Abstract
Self-compassion involves reappraising negative events, accepting uncomfortable emotions, and practicing self-kindness. This thesis examined the effect of cultivating self-compassion via daily self-compassionate writing completed online for one week on stigmatizing and affirming self-perceptions in young undergraduate women. Undergraduate women (N = 254) were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions (i.e., self-compassionate writing, attentional-control, wait-list control) and completed measures of trait self-compassion, fear of self-compassion, affirming self-perceptions (i.e., body appreciation and broad conceptualization of beauty), and stigmatizing self-perceptions (i.e., self-objectification and phenomenological body shame) at baseline, post-test, and one-month follow-up. Hypotheses were tested using MANCOVA and a latent growth modelling (LGM) approach. MANCOVA revealed no change across conditions. LGM revealed a significant increase in the slope for self-compassion and a significant decrease in the slope for self-objectification and overidentification across time in the self-compassion condition, but the effects were small. Implications and future directions for self-compassion interventions are discussed.