Open Collections

Nutini, Alison Elizabeth

University of British Columbia

Emotional and biological responses to stress play a key role in determining risk for psychopathology following exposure to environmental stressors. Thus, it is critical to determine factors that influence individual differences in the stress response. Self-compassion may be one such factor, as researchers have theorized that self-compassion promotes adaptive responses to stress. The focus of this dissertation is on examining the association of self-compassion with emotional and biological markers of stress in youth. In Chapter 1, I assessed the association of self-compassion with emotional (negative and positive affect) and biological (cortisol) responses to an acute laboratory stressor. In Chapters 2 and 3, I examined the association of self-compassion with markers of emotional (negative and positive affect) and biological (cortisol) stress during a naturalistic stressor, namely the transition from elementary school to high school (Chapter 2) and the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent school closures and social distancing measures (Chapter 3). Overall, findings provided mixed evidence for the role of self-compassion in buffering responses to stressors. Specifically, results suggest that self-compassion may be differentially associated with affective versus biological markers of stress. This dissertation is an important addition to the nascent literature examining self-compassion as a factor that promotes adaptive responses to stress in adolescents.

Text

2023-05-01

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/84516

Psychology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/