title: When leaving your ex, love yourself: observational ratings of self-compassion predict the course of emotional recovery following marital separation.
abstract: Divorce is a highly stressful event, and much remains to be learned about the factors that promote psychological resilience when marriages come to an end. In this study, divorcing adults (N = 109) completed a 4-min stream-of-consciousness recording about their marital separation at an initial laboratory visit. Four judges rated the degree to which participants exhibited self-compassion (defined by self-kindness, an awareness of one's place in shared humanity, and emotional equanimity) in their recordings. Judges evidenced considerable agreement in their ratings of participants' self-compassion, and these ratings demonstrated strong predictive utility: Higher levels of self-compassion at the initial visit were associated with less divorce-related emotional intrusion into daily life at the start of the study, and this effect persisted up to 9 months later. These effects held when we accounted for a number of competing predictors. Self-compassion is a modifiable variable, and if our findings can be replicated, they may have implications for improving the lives of divorcing adults.
authors.affiliation: University of Arizona, USA. sbarra@email.arizona.edu
authors.forename: David A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Sbarra
authors.forename: Hillary L
authors.initials: HL
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.forename: Matthias R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Mehl
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004243:Divorce / Q000523:psychology*; D004644:Emotions; D004645:Empathy; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008016:Life Change Events; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D055500:Resilience, Psychological; D012649:Self Concept; D013315:Stress, Psychological