ArticlePLOS mental health2026
Self-compassion, psychological distress, and mental well-being in a predominantly young student sample: Cross-sectional associations and continuous interaction analysis.
Article in PLOS mental health, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
This study examined the cross-sectional associations of self-compassion and psychological distress with mental well-being in a predominantly young student sample and tested whether self-compassion modifies the association between distress and well-being. The dual-continua framework guided the simultaneous consideration of distress and positive mental health. Participants (N = 278) completed the Self-Compassion Scale-Short Form (SCS-SF), General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12), and Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (WEMWBS). The principal analysis used mean-centred continuous predictors in hierarchical multiple regression, followed by simple-slopes and Johnson-Neyman analyses. Heteroscedasticity-consistent standard errors and sensitivity analyses were used to examine robustness. Secondary analyses comprised a median-split ANOVA examining categorical main and interaction effects and stratified Spearman correlations estimating the self-compassion-well-being association within distress groups. Higher self-compassion was associated with greater well-being, B = 0.230, 95% CI [0.126, 0.334], p < .001, whereas greater distress was associated with lower well-being, B = -1.450, 95% CI [-1.685, -1.214], p < .001. The continuous interaction was small, B = -0.028, 95% CI [-0.055, -0.001], ΔR² = .008, p = .039. The negative coefficient indicated that the positive self-compassion-well-being association weakened as distress increased and ran counter to the hypothesised protective buffering effect. The interaction was also sensitive to influential-case exclusions, alternative GHQ-12 scoring, and bootstrap estimation, while the secondary median-split ANOVA interaction was non-significant, p = .875. Higher self-compassion and lower psychological distress were independently associated with greater well-being. The small, specification-sensitive interaction provided no evidence of the hypothesised protective buffering effect. Parallel assessment of distress and well-being is warranted, while causal, clinical, and structural conclusions require longitudinal, experimental, and latent-variable research.
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