ArticleFrontiers in psychology2025
Exploring relationships between self-compassion, impostor phenomenon, and mental health among doctoral students.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Introduction: Impostor phenomenon (IP) is widespread in doctoral education and is strongly linked to mental distress. Self-compassion is theoretically and empirically positioned as a counterbalance to the harsh self-evaluation embedded in IP, yet large-scale evidence in doctoral populations is limited. Methods: A national sample of 1,225 U.S. doctoral students completed validated measures of IP, self-compassion, anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Data were collected via online survey. Analyses included descriptive statistics, correlations, MANOVA tests comparing mental health across IP tertiles, and three hierarchical regression models testing whether self-compassion explained additional variance in distress beyond IP. Results: IP scores were skewed high; women and non-binary students reported the highest IP. Anxiety, depression, and loneliness rose as IP increased. Across all three outcomes, self-compassion explained substantial additional variance beyond IP (ΔR² = 0.08-0.10) and meaningfully reduced IP's standardized coefficients (47%-75%). When self-compassion was added, IP was no longer associated with loneliness, and its associations with depression and anxiety were weakened. MANOVA showed large-effect, stepwise increases in distress from low to moderate IP, while self-compassion declined at each IP level. Discussion: IP was widespread in this sample and was associated with substantially elevated levels of distress, including at low to moderate IP levels. Self-compassion demonstrated robust inverse associations with loneliness, anxiety, and depression even when IP was considered in the models. The pattern of results indicates that self-compassion is a salient correlate of mental health in the context of IP among doctoral students.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.