Personality and Self-Compassion: Exploring Their Relationships in an Indian Context

Abstract

The present study examines the relationship between personality and self-compassion among Indian emerging adults. Two samples of emerging adult males (N1 = 494 Catholic seminarians, N2 = 504 Catholic non-seminarians) completed the Big Five Inventory, the Honesty-Humility Subscale of HEXACO and the Self-Compassion Scale–Short Form. Primarily, we examined the mean-level differences for Big Five factors, honesty-humility and self-compassion between the samples and found that mean-levels were higher for seminarians except for neuroticism. Therefore, we treated the samples separately for further analyses. Secondly, we examined the associations between personality factors of the Big Five, honesty-humility and self-compassion. Consciousness, agreeableness and extraversion were positively associated with self-compassion. Neuroticism had a large negative correlation with self-compassion. Openness to experience had a medium positive relationship with self-compassion among seminarians and a small positive relationship among emerging adult non-seminarians. A medium positive association was found between honesty-humility and self-compassion. Thirdly, we examined the impact of personality factors on self-compassion. Self-compassion was significantly and positively predicted by agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience and honesty-humility for seminarians and by extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness for non-seminarians. Neuroticism was a significant negative predictor of self-compassion for both samples.