During large-scale disasters, social support, caring behaviours, and compassion are shown to protect against poor mental health outcomes. This multi-national study aimed to assess the fluctuations in compassion over time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Respondents (Time 1 n = 4156, Time 2 n = 980, Time 3 n = 825) from 23 countries completed online self-report questionnaires measuring the flows of compassion (i.e....
The COVID-19 pandemic is a massive global health crisis with damaging consequences to mental health and social relationships. Exploring factors that may heighten or buffer the risk of mental health problems in this context is thus critical. Whilst compassion may be a protective factor, in contrast fears of compassion increase vulnerability to psychosocial distress and may amplify the impact of the pandemic on m...
Objective: Shame contains external and internal aspects. However, a Japanese language scale for simultaneously assessing both aspects of shame has not been developed to date. This study aimed to standardize the Japanese version of the External and Internal Shame Scale (EISS-J). An online survey was conducted among university students (N=203) at six universities in Japan (Study 1). A retest questionnaire was sen...
Historically social connection has been an important way through which humans have coped with large-scale threatening events. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns have deprived people of major sources of social support and coping, with others representing threats. Hence, a major stressor during the pandemic has been a sense of social disconnection and loneliness. This study explores how people's e...
The last few years have seen increasing research on self-report measures of compassion. The Compassionate Engagement and Action Scale (CEAS) is rooted in an evolutionary approach to compassion, which focuses on the competencies of compassion those are engagement with distress or suffering, and taking action to alleviate and prevent it. This study sought to validate the CEAS in a Japanese population using a cros...