Self-Compassion as the Predictor of Flourishing of the Students

The study aimed to examine the impacts of self-compassion and gender on the human flourishing of the participants. Five hundred undergraduate and postgraduate students with an equal number of male and female served as the participants in the study. The age of the male participants ranged from 17 years to 25 years (M = 20.13, SD = 2.15) whereas the age of female participants spanned from 18 years to 25 years (M = 19.89, SD = 1.85). Self-Compassion Scale (Neff, 2003a) and Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (Keyes, 2005) were employed to measure the self-compassion and flourishing of the participants, respectively. The results of the study exhibited no gender differences in self-compassion and flourishing of the male and female participants. The male and female participants with low, average and high levels of self-compassion differed significantly in their evocation of mean scores of flourishing. The results of the study also evinced that scores on self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness components of self-compassion demonstrated positive correlations with the hedonic human flourishing, social well-being, psychological well-being, eudaimonic human flourishing and overall human flourishing. Contrarily, the scores of self-judgement were found to be negatively correlated with the scores of human flourishing and its components of the male, female and all the participants. It is evident that the positive components of self-compassion were positively correlated with the different components of human flourishing. Lastly, the results of the study demonstrated that the scores on self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness components of self-compassion accounted for significant variance in the scores of hedonic human flourishing, social well-being, psychological well-being, eudaimonic human flourishing and overall human flourishing. Conversely, the variance caused by the scores of self-judgement, isolation and over-identification parts of self-compassion in the scores of these measures was low and statistically non-significant positive. The results of the study have significant implications for the researchers, academicians, laymen, counselors and clinical psychologists. The findings of the present study have been discussed in the light of current theories of self-compassion and human flourishing. The limitations and future directions for research have also been discussed.