A Weight Off the Shoulders: The Effects of Self-Compassion on Affect and Self-Stigma Following Negative Association with Weight and Body-Image

Stigmatization of overweight individuals in the United States is both profound and increasing. Common coping strategies assume that self-esteem moderates psychological distress arising from stigma but recent theoretical perspectives have investigated how an alternative construct, self-compassion, may protect against weight and body-image stigma. One hundred and two female participants were asked to recall an event where they felt negatively about their weight or body-image. Participants were randomly assigned to a condition designed to increase self-compassion, enhance self-esteem, or a control condition. A greater degree of self-compassion indicated less propensity to endorse weight-related stigma towards self and others; degree of self-esteem did not influence weight-related stigma endorsement. Neither self-compassion nor self-esteem influenced affect following recalling a negative event pertaining to weight or body image. Future work needs to establish that self-compassion can be experimentally primed and that the pattern of results in this study can be replicated in more diverse samples.