Understanding the Affective and Mental Health Outcomes of Meditation Interventions: The Role of Individual Differences in Self-compassion.
Mindfulness January 1, 2026 Manuella B Kury, Barbara L. Fredrickson, Patty van Cappellen et al.
People with lower self-compassion before starting meditation training tend to gain greater emotional and mental health benefits. In a randomized intervention, 217 adults received six weeks of either mindfulness meditation or loving-kindness meditation. Those who began with lower self-compassion showed larger reductions in depressive symptoms and greater improvements in positive emotions and social connectedness over the intervention period. Increases in self-compassion from before to after training explained the link between meditation and lower depression, but only for those initially low in self-compassion. The findings suggest that individual differences in self-compassion shape how much people benefit from meditation, with those lowest in self-compassion potentially gaining the most.