Self-compassion test accuracy: what research says and why your score changes

Your self-compassion test gives 2.42, “Low self-compassion”; a few weeks later you take it again and get 2.50, “Moderate self-compassion”; another site gave you 30 out of 60, and yet another said anything from 3.6 up is high. Stories like these are common, and they raise the obvious questions: which one is right, and can a self-compassion test be trusted at all?

The short answer: the Self-Compassion Scale that mind.io uses has measured self-compassion fairly consistently in research. The 26-item original by the psychologist Kristin Neff had an internal consistency of .92 in its development study and a correlation of .93 when it was taken again about three weeks later (Neff, 2003), and the 12-item short form mind.io uses correlated .97 or more with the full scale’s total and had an internal consistency of .86 or more in all three samples (Raes et al., 2011). But Neff herself says there are no clinical norms or scores that mark someone as high or low in self-compassion (Neff, n.d.-a), and researchers still debate whether the kind and the harsh statements should be read as one score (Ferrari et al., 2022, from the abstract). mind.io’s Korean, Japanese and French statements are also its own translations, not the versions validated in research.

This guide covers how reliable the scale and its short form have been in research, why there is no official score from which self-compassion counts as high, the debate over the kind and the harsh statements, why your score moves when you take the test again, what a self-compassion score can miss, and how to read and use your result. Where your score on the mind.io self-compassion test sits next to other people is covered in average self-compassion score, the evidence on practices that build it in how to build self-compassion, and what self-compassion is and how it differs from self-esteem in self-compassion versus self-esteem.

The Self-Compassion Scale is a 26-item scale Neff published in 2003. It splits responses to hard moments into six subscales (being kind to yourself or judging yourself harshly, seeing difficulties as part of being human or feeling you are the only one, holding feelings in balance or getting swept up in them) and asks, from 1 to 5, how often each statement applies. The accuracy of a scale like this is usually judged in three ways: whether the items point the same way (internal consistency), whether a retest a short while later gives similar results (test-retest reliability), and whether it measures what it means to and connects sensibly with other measures (validity). In the development study the internal consistency was .92 in 391 students, and when another 232 students took it twice about three weeks apart, the retest correlation was .93 for the total and .80 to .88 for the subscales. Its correlation with a measure of the wish to look good to others was .05, which was not significant (Neff, 2003).

The short form keeps two items from each subscale of the full scale, 12 in all. It was built on Dutch data from 271 first-year psychology students at the University of Leuven in Belgium, its structure was checked in another 185 Dutch speakers, and the English version was then given to 415 students at the University of Texas at Austin. In all three samples the short form’s total correlated .97 or more with the full scale’s (.98 in English), and the English version’s internal consistency was .86. The two-item subscales, however, reached only .54 to .75 in English, and the authors advised using the full scale when subscale information matters (Raes et al., 2011). That paper reported no retest, but other studies did. The Spanish short form showed a one-to-two-week retest agreement (ICC) of .89 in 103 health-service workers chosen at random (Garcia-Campayo et al., 2014); in the UK it was .81 over six months in 240 people with chronic pain and .59 over 12 months in 256 community adults without pain (Gillett et al., 2025). In 594 Swedish adults aged 66 to 102, the short form’s internal consistency was only .68, and its reliability was judged insufficient in that group (Bratt & Fagerström, 2020, from the abstract).

In Korea, the 26-item Korean version came from two studies of university students; a six-factor model fitted better than one- or three-factor models, and internal consistency was reported as good (Kim et al., 2008, from the abstract). A study that took that version’s wording as it was for the 12 short-form items and checked it in 650 people aged 19 to 29 found an internal consistency of .83 for the total (Oh et al., 2025). Another team judged that some items of the existing Korean version had been translated less accurately, retranslated the scale and checked it in 510 people (Chae et al., 2024, from the abstract).

The Japanese version (SCS-J) was translated with the author’s permission and refined through back-translation. Its total showed an internal consistency of .84 in 366 students (.72 to .82 for the subscales), and when another 101 students took it twice eight weeks apart, the retest correlation was .83 for the total (.61 to .77 for the subscales). The six-factor model fitted less well than in the original, though (CFI .86 against .91; Arimitsu, 2014). The French version was made by a team in Belgium through back-translation; in 1,554 people aged 15 to 83, recruited through the web page of a television programme about happiness, the total’s internal consistency was .94 and the subscales’ .74 to .89. An index of how much of the response variance a single general factor explains (omega) was also .94, so the authors considered a single total worth using, but they reported no retest (Kotsou & Leys, 2016). We did not find a separate validation of a French short form.

The mind.io self-compassion test uses the 12 short-form items in their published order, asks for answers from 1 (almost never) to 5 (almost always) (the published form labels only the two ends; the three middle labels are mind.io’s wording), counts the six harsh statements (items 1, 4, 8, 9, 11 and 12) as 6 minus the answer and takes the mean of the 12 items (1.00 to 5.00). The English statements follow the published wording, but the Korean, Japanese and French statements are mind.io’s own translations, so they are not the wording of the Korean, Japanese and French versions above. Neff’s guidance suggests that anyone using the short form in another language take its 12 items from an existing translation of the full scale (Neff, n.d.-a); mind.io did not do that. mind.io has not studied the reliability or validity of its test either, so the figures above describe research versions of the scale, not how accurate a mind.io result is.

Depression and anxiety self-checks set their cut-offs by comparing them with diagnostic interviews: how many real cases they find (sensitivity) and how many people without the condition they rule out (specificity). Self-compassion is not a diagnosis, so there is nothing to compare against. Neff’s short-form information sheet says there are no clinical norms or scores that indicate someone is high or low in self-compassion, that scores are mainly used to compare outcomes for people scoring higher or lower, and that some researchers split a sample at its median (Neff, n.d.-a).

There are rough rubrics all the same, but they differ slightly from one of Neff’s materials to the next. The short-form information sheet offers, as an ad hoc rubric, 1.0 to 2.49 as low, 2.5 to 3.5 as moderate and 3.51 to 5.0 as high (Neff, n.d.-a); her FAQ for researchers, which also says there are no formal norms, gives 2.5 to 3.49 as moderate and 3.5 to 5.0 as high (Neff, n.d.-b). Her public self-test page says overall averages tend to be around 3.0 and splits the range into 1 to 2.5, 2.5 to 3.5 and 3.5 to 5 (Neff, n.d.-c), and a handbook chapter on the scale notes that US students and community adults average very close to 3.0 with a standard deviation very close to 0.60, so that 2.4 or below could be considered low, 2.4 to 3.6 average and 3.6 or above high (Neff & Tóth-Király, 2022). Calculated on the scores mind.io can produce, the only score the information sheet and the FAQ name differently is 3.50 (moderate on the sheet, high in the FAQ), and on the handbook’s rubric 2.42 and 3.58 would both count as “average.”

Even the same scale can give different numbers. Neff’s current guidance scores the scale as a 1-to-5 mean (Neff, n.d.-a), but the original paper added up the six subscale means for a total (Neff, 2003), and the short-form paper reported the sum of the 12 items. The US students in that paper summed to 36.00 on average (Raes et al., 2011), which, calculated, is 3.00 when divided by 12, the 1-to-5 mean mind.io shows. So before comparing a score from elsewhere, check that it is on the same scale. Calculated, dividing a 12-item sum by 12, or a sum of the six subscale means by 6, gives the 1-to-5 mean. The 26-item full scale and the 12-item short form averaged almost the same in the same students (average self-compassion score).

mind.io’s result also splits the mean into 1.00 to 2.49 as “Low self-compassion,” 2.50 to 3.50 as “Moderate self-compassion” and 3.51 to 5.00 as “High self-compassion.” These are the edges of Neff’s short-form information sheet, and mind.io too says they make the result easier to read and are not clinical criteria. A 2.42 and a 2.50 are not different kinds of people; the names are short labels for positions on one continuous scale.

Half of the scale’s statements describe kind responses to yourself (self-kindness, common humanity, mindfulness) and the other half their harsh opposites (self-judgment, isolation, over-identification). Reversing the harsh ones and averaging everything together follows from Neff’s view of self-compassion as one continuum running from harsh responding to kind responding (Neff, 2022). Calculated with mind.io’s scoring, choosing the same answer for all twelve statements, whether “Almost never” or “Almost always,” always gives a mean of 3.00, “Moderate self-compassion.”

Whether the two strands belong in one score has long been debated. Even in the full scale’s development study, the kind and the harsh statements of each component formed two correlated factors, while a single higher-order self-compassion factor explained the correlations among the six (Neff, 2003). A meta-analysis of 18 studies found the harsh statements significantly more strongly linked to mental health problems than the kind ones, and concluded that a total score may inflate the link between self-compassion and those problems (Muris & Petrocchi, 2017, from the abstract). In data from 576 people the harsh factor correlated .85 or more with facets of neuroticism (the tendency to feel negative emotions easily), which led its authors to call it redundant (Pfattheicher et al., 2017, from the abstract); in 1,115 college students a model with two general factors, “self-compassion” and “self-coldness,” fitted best (Brenner et al., 2017, from the abstract); and in 1,643 Dutch community adults the six-factor structure was not replicated, and two factors emerged, the positively and the negatively worded statements (López et al., 2015, from the abstract). By the critics’ count, 72.0% of studies with the scale used the total score as their overall measure of self-compassion, and 89.8% of those with the short form (Muris & Otgaar, 2020).

Other analyses support a total score. The scale’s authors analysed full-scale data from 7 English-language samples and 13 samples in other languages, including Japan and Korea, 11,685 people in all. One- and two-factor models did not fit in any sample; bifactor models with two correlated general factors, a kind and a harsh one, fitted well, but their factor loadings showed that the two factors were not well separated; and in a model with one general factor and six specific factors the general factor explained 95% of the reliable item variance. The authors took this as support for a total score or six subscale scores, but not for two separate scores for the kind and the harsh side (Neff et al., 2019). The same authors’ reanalysis of the 576-person data found a general factor explaining 94% of the item variance and self-compassion overlapping with neuroticism but distinct from it (Neff et al., 2018, from the abstract), and their analysis of 18 samples in 12 languages found the scale working the same way across them (Tóth-Király & Neff, 2021). In UK adults studied by another team, the total score identified depression, anxiety and high wellbeing more accurately than either of the two scores (Rakhimov et al., 2022, from the abstract).

Both sides accept one finding: the harsh statements predict mental health problems such as depression and anxiety more strongly than the kind ones. Neff reads this as the total score “explaining,” not “inflating,” the link (Neff & Tóth-Király, 2022; Neff, 2022). A review that weighed the evidence on both sides concluded that the data cannot yet resolve the debate and that neither position has been proven right or wrong, and proposed choosing the score according to the timeframe, the circumstances and differences between people (Ferrari et al., 2022, from the abstract).

Korean and Japanese data touch on the same debate. In Korean short-form data from 650 people aged 19 to 29, recruited through online notices at mental health and suicide prevention centres, the authors judged a two-factor model with a kind and a harsh side the most suitable when several fit indices were weighed together, and the harsh-side score, not reversed, correlated .56 with both depression (PHQ-9) and anxiety (GAD-7) scores, while the kind-side score correlated −.23 and −.20 (Oh et al., 2025). In the Japanese version the correlation between the self-kindness and self-judgment factors was only −.25, against −.81 in the original, and the author pointed to two possible causes, translated words that may not separate the positive and negative meanings well enough and cultural background, proposing that for now the positive and negative factor totals also be calculated (Arimitsu, 2014).

On mind.io’s result page, the “Tendencies across the three components” cards show, for each component, a bar for the “Kinder side” and the “Harsher side,” each the mean of two answers (the harsh side before reversing). Given that the short form’s two-item subscales had an internal consistency of .54 to .75 in English, mind.io shows these only as tendencies, not as scores, and says one side came up more often only when the two sums differ by 2 points or more (1 point on average). Calculated with mind.io’s scoring, choosing the same answer for every statement makes the two bars equal in all three components, which reads as the two kinds of response mixed about evenly. The Korean short-form study left out 133 people whose responses were duplicates or identical across all items (Oh et al., 2025). So before reading differences between components, ask yourself whether you picked the same box regardless of what the statements said. What each of the three components means is set out in self-compassion versus self-esteem.

In research, self-compassion scores have been fairly stable over a few weeks. The full scale’s retest correlation was .93 over about three weeks (Neff, 2003), the Spanish short form’s .89 over one to two weeks (Garcia-Campayo et al., 2014) and the Japanese version’s .83 over eight weeks (Arimitsu, 2014). Over longer gaps scores move more: in UK short-form data, 240 people with chronic pain showed .81 over six months and 256 community adults .59 over 12 months (Gillett et al., 2025).

The scale was designed to ask how you tend to respond in hard moments, a trait, rather than how you feel right now (Neff, 2023); a separate state self-compassion scale measures the present moment (Neff & Tóth-Király, 2022). mind.io likewise asks you to think of how you typically treat yourself in difficult times, but if the last few weeks have been unusually hard, that can easily colour your answers. Self-compassion is also a habit that changes with practice: a meta-analysis of 27 randomised controlled trials of self-compassion training found that all six subscales changed significantly (Ferrari et al., 2019, as cited in Neff & Tóth-Király, 2022). Which practices helped, and how much, is covered in how to build self-compassion. When an earlier result is saved in the same browser, mind.io’s result page shows how much your mean changed and notes that self-compassion scores shift with practice and with what is going on in your life, so it is the trend that counts, not one change.

Calculated with mind.io’s scoring, moving one answer by one step changes the 12-item sum by 1 point and the mean by a twelfth of a point, about 0.08. The mean on screen is rounded to two decimals, so the same single step can show as a change of 0.08 or 0.09. Because the mean moves only in twelfths, 2.49 and 3.51, the exact range edges, never actually appear: the highest “Low self-compassion” score, 2.42, and the lowest “Moderate self-compassion” score, 2.50, are one answer apart, and so are the highest “Moderate self-compassion” score, 3.50, and the lowest “High self-compassion” score, 3.58. Changing one statement’s answer from “Almost never” to “Almost always” moves the mean by 0.33. There is no note when a score sits near a range edge, so look at the number rather than the name.

If you want to retake the test, leave a few weeks and take it in a similar situation. Retaking it straight away because you don’t like the result makes it easy to remember the statements and pick the answers you want. Jot down what happened and what you practised in between, and look at the direction over several results rather than one difference.

Self-compassion scores are fairly strongly related to mental health. In a meta-analysis of 20 samples from 14 studies, the correlation between self-compassion and mental health problems was −.54, a value corrected for the scales’ reliability (MacBeth & Gumley, 2012, from the abstract), and in a meta-analysis of 79 samples and 16,416 people the correlation with well-being was .47 (Zessin et al., 2015, from the abstract). In the full scale’s development study, scores correlated .59 with the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, −.55 with depression and −.66 with anxiety (Neff, 2003). Correlations alone cannot show which comes first, though: these numbers cannot tell whether low self-compassion makes things hard or hard times make self-compassion come out low. As shown above, the link with mental health problems is stronger for the harsh statements; in other areas, such as happiness, wisdom or body appreciation, the handbook chapter on the scale reports that all six subscales contributed about equally (Neff & Tóth-Király, 2022). How it differs from self-esteem is covered in self-compassion versus self-esteem.

The scale is a self-report questionnaire. In its development study it was not significantly related to the wish to look good to others (Neff, 2003), but how far the harsh statements overlap with neuroticism is, as described above, still debated. A score shows how you feel you treat yourself, not how others see you.

Comparing countries also needs care. In data from 18 samples in 12 languages, the scale worked the same way but levels of self-compassion differed between groups. Among the student samples the Korean one scored highest, but it consisted of adults attending an online university, aged 38.8 on average, and the authors cautioned that the result may reflect the sample (Tóth-Király & Neff, 2021). A study comparing the US, Thailand and Taiwan found the highest scores in Thailand and the lowest in Taiwan (Neff et al., 2008, from the abstract), and the Japanese version’s study noted that its own mean of 2.89 was closest to that study’s Taiwanese average (Neff et al., 2008, as cited in Arimitsu, 2014). Your score is better compared with similar people measured on the same version than with another country’s average (average self-compassion score).

A self-compassion score cannot screen for depression or anxiety either. The mind.io self-compassion test does not diagnose depression, anxiety or other mental health difficulties. If a low mood has lasted more than two weeks, take the depression check-in (PHQ-9) as well. That is not a diagnosis either; how to read its score is in PHQ-9 accuracy.

And don’t use the score to judge other people. Asking a child, partner or colleague to take the test and then labelling them “low in self-compassion,” or using it in hiring or appraisals, is not what the test is for. The component bars rest on two statements each, too few to separate the three components by small differences.

First, look at the number and its distance from the range edges rather than the range name. 2.42 and 2.50, and 3.50 and 3.58, are one answer apart, so even with different names they sit in nearly the same place.

Second, treat the three component bars as clues only. If one component’s harsher side stands out above its kinder side, that component is a candidate for practice. Before reading it that way, though, check that you did not pick the same box for every statement.

Third, compare like with like. On the same 1-to-5 mean, 500 Korean adults who took the 26-item Korean version averaged 3.35, and 415 US students 3.00 on the short form (average self-compassion score). Divide a 12-item sum by 12, or a sum of six subscale means by 6, before comparing, and don’t compare directly with another country’s average.

Fourth, if you retake the test, practise for a few weeks first, take it in a similar situation and look at the direction rather than one difference. How to build self-compassion can be a starting point for which practice to try.

Fifth, if blaming yourself has gone on for more than a few weeks, or things feel too heavy to manage daily life, don’t carry it alone: talk to someone you trust, a school or workplace counselling service, or a professional counsellor. mind.io’s result page also shows this kind of note for “Low self-compassion,” and adds crisis lines when the mean is 1.75 or below.

What not to do: don’t use one score to decide you are “someone with no self-compassion,” don’t read a high score as having low standards, and don’t treat a low score as a flaw to fix. A self-compassion score is a gauge of how you tend to treat yourself in hard moments, not a verdict.

Q. Can a self-compassion test be trusted? A. The research versions of the scale hang together fairly well and give similar results when retaken a few weeks later. The full scale showed an internal consistency of .92 and a three-week retest correlation of .93 (Neff, 2003); the short form correlated .97 or more with the full scale’s total, with an internal consistency of .86 or more (Raes et al., 2011); and the Spanish short form had a one-to-two-week retest agreement of .89 (Garcia-Campayo et al., 2014). But there is no official cut-off, and mind.io’s version has not been validated separately (its English items follow the published wording, but the middle answer labels and the other languages are its own), so use the result as a rough gauge of how you treat yourself in hard moments.

Q. What score counts as low self-compassion? A. There are no formal norms or cut-offs (Neff, n.d.-a). mind.io’s edges at 2.50 and 3.51 follow the ad hoc rubric in Neff’s short-form information sheet, while her FAQ for researchers counts 3.5 and above as high (Neff, n.d.-b). See how others score in average self-compassion score.

Q. My score differs from another site or a paper. A. Scores can be a 1-to-5 mean, a 12-item sum or a sum of six subscale means (Neff, n.d.-a; Raes et al., 2011), and the 26-item full scale and the 12-item short form, translations and answer options can differ too. Compare only scores converted to the same scale.

Q. My score changed since last time. Which one is right? A. Both reflect you at the time. Calculated with mind.io’s scoring, a single different answer moves the mean by about 0.08, and in research the retest correlations were .83 to .93 over a few weeks and .59 over 12 months (Neff, 2003; Arimitsu, 2014; Gillett et al., 2025). Self-compassion changes with practice and circumstances, so look at the direction over several results.

Q. Is it right to reverse the harsh statements and add them in? A. Researchers disagree. Critics argue that the harsh statements are more strongly tied to mental health problems, so a total inflates the link (Muris & Petrocchi, 2017, from the abstract); an analysis of 20 samples found a general factor explaining 95% of the reliable item variance, supporting a total (Neff et al., 2019); and a review of both sides concluded that the debate cannot yet be settled (Ferrari et al., 2022, from the abstract). mind.io shows a single mean, as the scale’s author advises.

Q. Why are there no separate component scores? A. The short form has only two items per component, so its English subscales reached an internal consistency of only .54 to .75, and the authors advised using the 26-item full scale when subscales matter (Raes et al., 2011). That is why mind.io shows the components only as reference bars.

Q. I gave every statement the same answer and got 3.00. A. Calculated with mind.io’s scoring, the six kind and six harsh statements cancel out, so the same answer everywhere, whatever it is, always gives a mean of 3.00, “Moderate self-compassion.” The Korean short-form study also left out responses that were identical across all items (Oh et al., 2025). Try answering again with each statement’s content in mind.

Q. It’s so hard I’m having thoughts of harming myself. A. Then help comes before practice. Reach out to a crisis line right away: call or text 988 in the US and Canada, call Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland, or find a line at findahelpline.com elsewhere. If you are in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services.

References: Arimitsu, K. (2014), Development and validation of the Japanese version of the Self-Compassion Scale [in Japanese], The Japanese Journal of Psychology 85(1), 50-59, https://doi.org/10.4992/jjpsy.85.50; Bratt, A., & Fagerström, C. (2020), Self-compassion in old age: Confirmatory factor analysis of the 6-factor model and the internal consistency of the Self-compassion scale-short form, Aging & Mental Health 24(4), 642-648, https://doi.org/10.1080/13607863.2019.1569588; Brenner, R. E., Heath, P. J., Vogel, D. L., & Credé, M. (2017), Two is more valid than one: Examining the factor structure of the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS), Journal of Counseling Psychology 64(6), 696-707, https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000211; Chae, S. W., Cheon, J. E., Latner, J. D., & Kim, Y.-H. (2024), Translation and validation study of the Korean Self-Compassion Scale, Mindfulness 15(10), 2697-2709, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-024-02453-z; Ferrari, M., Ciarrochi, J., Yap, K., Sahdra, B., & Hayes, S. C. (2022), Embracing the complexity of our inner worlds: Understanding the dynamics of self-compassion and self-criticism, Mindfulness 13(7), 1652-1661, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-022-01897-5; Ferrari, M., Hunt, C., Harrysunker, A., Abbott, M. J., Beath, A. P., & Einstein, D. A. (2019), Self-compassion interventions and psychosocial outcomes: A meta-analysis of RCTs, Mindfulness 10(8), 1455-1473, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-019-01134-6; Garcia-Campayo, J., Navarro-Gil, M., Andrés, E., Montero-Marin, J., López-Artal, L., & Demarzo, M. M. P. (2014), Validation of the Spanish versions of the long (26 items) and short (12 items) forms of the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS), Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 12, 4, https://doi.org/10.1186/1477-7525-12-4; Gillett, J. L., Rakhimov, A., Karadag, P., Themelis, K., Ji, C., & Tang, N. K. Y. (2025), Self-compassion in chronic pain: Validating the self-compassion scale short-form and exploring initial relationships with pain outcomes, British Journal of Pain 19(4), 239-256, https://doi.org/10.1177/20494637241312070; Kim, K. E., Yi, G. D., Cho, Y. R., Chai, S. H., & Lee, W. K. (2008), The validation study of the Korean version of the Self-Compassion Scale [in Korean], The Korean Journal of Health Psychology 13(4), 1023-1044, https://doi.org/10.17315/kjhp.2008.13.4.012; Kotsou, I., & Leys, C. (2016), Self-Compassion Scale (SCS): Psychometric properties of the French translation and its relations with psychological well-being, affect and depression, PLoS ONE 11(4), e0152880, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0152880; López, A., Sanderman, R., Smink, A., Zhang, Y., van Sonderen, E., Ranchor, A., & Schroevers, M. J. (2015), A reconsideration of the Self-Compassion Scale’s total score: Self-compassion versus self-criticism, PLoS ONE 10(7), e0132940, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0132940; MacBeth, A., & Gumley, A. (2012), Exploring compassion: A meta-analysis of the association between self-compassion and psychopathology, Clinical Psychology Review 32(6), 545-552, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2012.06.003; Muris, P., & Otgaar, H. (2020), The process of science: A critical evaluation of more than 15 years of research on self-compassion with the Self-Compassion Scale, Mindfulness 11(6), 1469-1482, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-020-01363-0; Muris, P., & Petrocchi, N. (2017), Protection or vulnerability? A meta-analysis of the relations between the positive and negative components of self-compassion and psychopathology, Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy 24(2), 373-383, https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.2005; Neff, K. D. (2003), The development and validation of a scale to measure self-compassion, Self and Identity 2(3), 223-250, https://doi.org/10.1080/15298860309027; Neff, K. D. (2022), The differential effects fallacy in the study of self-compassion: Misunderstanding the nature of bipolar continuums, Mindfulness 13(3), 572-576, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-022-01832-8; Neff, K. D. (2023), Self-compassion: Theory, method, research, and intervention, Annual Review of Psychology 74, 193-218, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-032420-031047; Neff, K. D. (n.d.-a), Self-Compassion Scale – Short Form (SCS-SF) information sheet, https://self-compassion.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/SCS-SF-information.pdf; Neff, K. D. (n.d.-b), FAQs for researchers, https://self-compassion.org/faqs-for-researchers/; Neff, K. D. (n.d.-c), Test how self-compassionate you are, https://self-compassion.org/self-compassion-test/; Neff, K. D., Pisitsungkagarn, K., & Hsieh, Y.-P. (2008), Self-compassion and self-construal in the United States, Thailand, and Taiwan, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 39(3), 267-285, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022108314544; Neff, K. D., & Tóth-Király, I. (2022), Self-Compassion Scale (SCS), in O. N. Medvedev, C. U. Krägeloh, R. J. Siegert, & N. N. Singh (Eds.), Handbook of Assessment in Mindfulness Research, Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77644-2_36-1; Neff, K. D., Tóth-Király, I., & Colosimo, K. (2018), Self-compassion is best measured as a global construct and is overlapping with but distinct from neuroticism: A response to Pfattheicher, Geiger, Hartung, Weiss, and Schindler (2017), European Journal of Personality 32(4), 371-392, https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2148; Neff, K. D., Tóth-Király, I., Yarnell, L. M., Arimitsu, K., Castilho, P., Ghorbani, N., Guo, H. X., Hirsch, J. K., Hupfeld, J., Hutz, C. S., Kotsou, I., Lee, W. K., Montero-Marin, J., Sirois, F. M., de Souza, L. K., Svendsen, J. L., Wilkinson, R. B., & Mantzios, M. (2019), Examining the factor structure of the Self-Compassion Scale in 20 diverse samples: Support for use of a total score and six subscale scores, Psychological Assessment 31(1), 27-45, https://doi.org/10.1037/pas0000629; Oh, D., Na, H., & Jung, Y.-E. (2025), Validation of the Korean version of the Self-Compassion Scale-Short Form among young adults: A comparison of factor structures, Psychiatry Investigation 22(10), 1139-1146, https://doi.org/10.30773/pi.2025.0073; Pfattheicher, S., Geiger, M., Hartung, J., Weiss, S., & Schindler, S. (2017), Old wine in new bottles? The case of self-compassion and neuroticism, European Journal of Personality 31(2), 160-169, https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2097; Raes, F., Pommier, E., Neff, K. D., & Van Gucht, D. (2011), Construction and factorial validation of a short form of the Self-Compassion Scale, Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy 18(3), 250-255, https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.702; Rakhimov, A., Realo, A., & Tang, N. K. Y. (2022), The Self-Compassion Scale: Validation and psychometric properties within the exploratory structural equation modeling framework, Journal of Personality Assessment 105(3), 422-435, https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2022.2093731; Tóth-Király, I., & Neff, K. D. (2021), Is self-compassion universal? Support for the measurement invariance of the Self-Compassion Scale across populations, Assessment 28(1), 169-185, https://doi.org/10.1177/1073191120926232; Zessin, U., Dickhäuser, O., & Garbade, S. (2015), The relationship between self-compassion and well-being: A meta-analysis, Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being 7(3), 340-364, https://doi.org/10.1111/aphw.12051