Recently a compassionate love scale was developed to assess compassionate love or altruistic love for different targets (e.g., romantic partner, close others and all the humanity; Sprecher & Fehr, 2005). This study was conducted to examine the psychometric properties of the Compassionate Love Scale in the Portuguese context. In addition, it has been examined how compassionate love for a romanti...

Background Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) and Compassionate Mind Training (CMT) aim to help people cultivate compassion for self others. To date, there is little evidence exploring the effects CMT has on those engaged in or embarking a career helping professions. Interventions that encourage self-reflection self-practice may practitioners self-compassion, leading promotion of self-care. Aim e...

In trying to improve clinician communication skills, we have often heard clinicians at every level admonished to "use silence," as if refraining from talking will improve dialogue. Yet we have also noticed that this "just do it," behavior-focused "use" of silence creates a new, different problem: the clinician looks uncomfortable using silence, and worse, generates a palpable atmosphere of unea...

The descriptive phenomenology of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) is well known in terms of the content of the beliefs, the attentional biases and the nature of the repetitive behaviors. Less has been written about the function of BDD symptoms in relationship to a perceived threat of a distorted body image and past aversive experiences. This article therefore explores the functional and evolution...

During the autumn of 2015, 21 Schwartz Rounds were held in England and Wales with the same topic: what makes a compassionate relationship between caregiver and patient? Participants explored themes such as the nature of compassion; what makes compassion difficult, and how to be compassionate, and the discussion within these themes and others are summarised. Many examples of compassionate behavi...

Excessive self-concern increases perceptions of threat and defensiveness. In contrast, fostering a more inclusive and expanded sense of self can reduce stress and improve well-being. We developed and tested a novel brief intervention designed to strengthen a student's compassionate self-identity, an identity that values balance and growth by reminding them of four quiet ego characteristics: det...

We provide first steps toward building a software agent/robot with compassionate intelligence. We approach this goal with an example software agent, EM-2. We also give a generalized software requirements guide for anyone wishing to pursue other means of building compassionate intelligence into an AI system. The purpose of EM-2 is not to build an agent with a state of mind that mimics empathy or...

There is increasing evidence for the effectiveness of brief, group-based compassionate mind training (CMT) in reducing shame and self-criticism, self-compassion. The current evaluation an 8-week CMT group programme NHS Physical Health Psychology Service supports these findings. Based on a cross-diagnostic sample 25-39 participants with physical health difficulties, results demonstrate significa...