Self-Compassion and Responses to Trauma: The Role of Emotion Regulation.

Emerging literature suggests that self-compassion may be an important concept for understanding recovery from the impact of trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The present study explored the interconnection among self-compassion, resilience, emotion dysregulation, and PTSD symptom severity in a sample of treatment-seeking women with PTSD. We predicted that self-compassion would be negatively related to PTSD symptom severity and to emotion dysregulation, and positively related to resilience. The results supported our main hypotheses. In addition, emotion dysregulation mediated the relationship between PTSD symptom severity and self-compassion and affected the relationship between self-compassion and resilience. These findings corroborate previous research that points to the important role of self-compassion in mental health and in the aftermath of stressful life events. The present study expands this research by demonstrating that PTSD symptom severity is negatively related to self-compassion in a clinical population of women with experiences of severe and repeated interpersonal trauma.

Disordered eating, perfectionism, and food rules.

Clinically significant trait perfectionism is often characteristic of individuals exhibiting symptoms of eating disorders. The present study reports on a measure developed to assess the use of food rules and evaluates the hypothesis that adherence to food rules may be one mechanism through which trait perfectionism exacerbates risk for developing eating disorder symptoms. Forty-eight female college students completed a battery of questionnaires, and multiple regression analyses were used to test a mediational model. Results indicated that adherence to food rules mediated the relationship between self-oriented perfectionism and three indices of disordered eating in this sample. This relationship was specific to self-oriented perfectionism and did not hold for other-oriented or socially prescribed perfectionism. These findings may have implications for designing early interventions for disordered eating and may be useful in tailoring treatment for individuals with disordered eating who also report high levels of perfectionism.