Browsing by Subject "itsemyötätuntomittari"

Objectives. Self-compassion is compassion toward oneself and it consist of treating oneself with kindness, understanding one’s shared humanity, and being mindful when considering negative aspects of oneself. Self-compassion is theorized to have positive mental health benefits and it is associated with psychological well-being. Depression is a mood disorder which is characterized by low mood, reduced energy and anhedonia. Is is the second leading cause of disability worldwide. The aim of this review was to describe the concept of self-compassion, define if self-compassion and depression are associated and how, and what mediators between self-compassion and depression have been discovered. Conclusions. High level of self-compassion was associated with lower levels of depression symptoms across the studies. Also the subscales of self-compassion were associated with depression in some studies. There were preliminary results that practising self-compassion might reduce depression symptoms. These practices didn’t have a straight impact on negative affects but instead had effect on rumination in the context of negative life events. The main mediators of the relationship between depression and self-compassion were discovered to be rumination, automatic thoughts, irrational beliefs, cognitive avoidance and shame. Self-compassion had been doscovered to correlate with emotional and cognitive reactions and buffer stress in the context of negative life events. There were multiple problems in the studies. The populations of the samples were restricted, when assessing self-compassion, almost all the studies used just one self-report measure of which validity is questionable and subscales partly overlap with depression symptoms. More work is needed to delineate the construct of self-compassion and to develop more valid and reliable assessment methods. Even thought there exists some serious shortcomings in the study of self-compassion, the association between self-compassion and depression is consistent. Increasing one’s self-compassion is theoretically easier than increasing one’s self-esteem, and it may help people to modify their deficits and change negative self-centered emotions to compassion toward one self.