Development and Application of a Vignette Measure of Self-Compassion

The purpose of this study was to examine self-compassionate and uncompassionate content in emerging adults’ automatic thoughts in response to vignettes of difficult situations. In Study 1, I created vignettes and developed a coding scheme to categorize respondents’ automatic thoughts generated in response to the vignettes. Participants reported their first three automatic thoughts to vignettes depicting challenging scenarios. A team of coders analyzed responses from the first sample (recruited through Mechanical Turk; N = 178) and organized them into categories. These categories included concepts central to Neff’s conceptualization of self- compassion: mindfulness vs. over-identification, self-kindness vs. self-judgment, and common humanity vs. isolation. In Study 2, personal failure and social rejection vignettes completed by undergraduate students (N = 586) were coded using these categories. Inter-rater reliability was high for most categories observed with reasonable frequency. Evidence for convergent validity was mixed. The most compelling evidence was for the coded categories of Self-Kindness, Self- Judgment, and Isolation. Associations between the categories and related variables of interest were small, but the confidence intervals (CIs) were narrow. Overall, automatic thoughts that conveyed a lack of self-compassion were much more common than were self-compassionate thoughts. Proportions of thoughts falling in each coding category differed according to vignette theme (i.e., failure and social rejection). In using self-compassion theory as a lens to observe and interpret the content of automatic thoughts, this study adds to understanding of the forms that compassion, or more commonly un-compassion toward oneself may take in response to difficult situations. It also provides a vignette measure and associated coding scheme for use in future research.