Abstract
Understanding factors associated with young people’s mental wellbeing and evaluating the effectiveness of interventions that are thought to promote mental wellbeing is becoming increasingly important, given the rise in prevalence of diagnosable mental health conditions within this population. Part one of this portfolio presents an empirical paper that investigated the relationship between self-compassion and psychological resilience in a UK adolescent sample. The role of self-reported stress as a mediator and gender as a moderator in this relationship was also explored. There was a significant relationship between self-compassion and psychological resilience, and this relationship was partially mediated by self-reported stress. The relationship between self-compassion and resilience was not moderated by gender.
Following the findings from the empirical paper, part two of this portfolio presents a systematic review and meta-analysis evaluating the effectiveness and acceptability of compassion-based interventions on reducing stress and increasing self-compassion for children and young people. Compassion-based interventions significantly reduced self-reported stress and increased self-compassion; however, significant improvements were only evident when comparisons were drawn before and after the intervention, and were not present when compassion-based interventions were compared to a control. Moreover, sub-group analysis found that this effectiveness was only true for non-clinical populations of children and young people, but not for those with clinically diagnosable mental health disorders.