Abstract
Self-compassion is measured with a self-report Likert-type scale and has been shown to be useful in promoting positive psychological functioning in many scientific areas, from social psychology to psychopathology. However, while most of these studies used the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS) to measure self-compassion in correlational designs, there are many criticisms concerning the psychometric properties of the SCS. The claim of this study is that the current SCS is insufficient in capturing the full scope of the concept self-compassion. Therefore, this study proposes that an avoidance dimension is added to SCS. The aim of this work is to (i) discuss the limits of the current SCS, (ii) propose additional items to measure avoidance behavior, and (iii) test the reliability and validity of the revised SCS. As expected, the newly generated avoidance items were valid in measuring avoidance behaviors. The revised SCS passed the reliability and validity tests and explained a greater amount of variance in well-being than the current SCS. The most important limits of the study are the construction of the items and the uneven distribution of females/males in the participant pool. The limits of the study and suggestions for further research are discussed.
Keywords
Self-compassion, avoidance, well-being