Understanding the Affective and Mental Health Outcomes of Meditation Interventions: The Role of Individual Differences in Self-compassion.

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Extensive research documents that mindfulness meditation (MM) and loving-kindness meditation (LKM) have benefits for emotional, social, and mental health outcomes. Despite this work documenting the benefits of meditation practice, research also demonstrates that meditation does not always have equivalent effects for all people. So, who is most likely to benefit from meditation practice? In this study, we proposed that individual differences in baseline levels of self-compassion may moderate the association between meditation training and affective, social, and mental health outcomes across time. To test this proposition, we used data from a randomized intervention study (collected from 2013 to 2015) where 217 adults received 6 weeks of training in either MM or LKM, and reported their emotions, feelings of social connectedness, and depressive symptoms. Consistent with our pre-registered hypotheses, results from multilevel analyses demonstrated that participants who were lower in self-compassion prior to the intervention tended to experience greater affective and mental health benefits across the course of the intervention period. Moderated mediation analyses demonstrated that increases in self-compassion from pre- to post-intervention mediated the relationship between training in meditation and lower depression across time, but only for those with lower baseline self-compassion levels. These findings spotlight the role of individual differences in self-compassion in contributing to people's response to meditation interventions, suggesting that people low in self-compassion may stand to benefit the most from meditation training. This study was pre-registered and the pre-registration can be viewed on https://aspredicted.org/48ik9.pdf. The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12671-026-02803-z.