Does kindness matter? Self-compassion buffers the negative impact of diabetes-distress on HbA1c
A M Friis1, M H Johnson1, R G Cutfield1
1Department of Psychological Medicine, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
Background:
Higher self-compassion is associated with mental and physical health benefits in both healthy and chronically ill populations. The current study investigated the role of self-compassion in predicting depression, diabetes-specific distress and HbA1c in patients with diabetes.
Aims:
To assess the specific operationalization of negative emotionality that best predicted HbA1c and to test whether self-compassion would buffer HbA1c in patients with diabetes against the negative effects of distress.
Methods:
Patients with diabetes (n = 110) completed measures assessing trait self-compassion, depression and diabetes-distress. HbA1c results were obtained through medical records.
Results:
As expected, diabetes-specific distress was a better predictor of HbA1c than depression; self-compassion moderated the relationship between distress and HbA1c such that higher distress predicted higher HbA1c at lower levels of self-compassion, but not at higher levels of self-compassion.
Conclusions:
In addition to further demonstrating the link between distress and metabolic outcomes, these findings suggest that self-compassion might buffer patients from the negative metabolic consequences of diabetes-distress.
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