Effects of Self-compassion Training on the Positive and Negative Emotions of Nursing Students: A Quasi-experimental Study

Paying attention to positive and negative emotions is very important and is one of the predictors of happiness and satisfaction in life. When judging the happiness and satisfaction of their lives, some people pay attention to the level of their negative and positive emotions, which indicates that their positive emotions prevail over negative ones. Nursing students experience a range of positive and negative emotions during their studies, and in the meantime, negative emotions and feelings can become more troublesome and hinder their learning. Studies show that emotions students experience in different learning environments can act as facilitators for their academic success, academic adjustment, and psychological well-being. Also, the results of studies show a significant positive relationship between students' positive emotion and their academic achievement. Students who receive compassion-based education have more hope, self-esteem, and overall mental health than their peers. The present study aimed to evaluate the effects of self-compassion training on the positive and negative emotions of nursing students.

This was a quasi-experimental study with pre-test and post-test design, which was conducted on 50 undergraduate nursing students studying at Iran University of Medical Sciences in the second semester of 2020. Inclusion criteria were being a bachelor student, not using psychiatric drugs, no stressful events such as divorce, death of loved ones, etc. in the past four months and a history of attending similar training classes. Exclusion criteria were not answering the exercises for at least 2 sessions. The students were selected through convenience sampling method and took the pretest. Then, students underwent training for eight 60-minute sessions (during one month and for two sessions each week). Some tasks were considered for the students in the interval of two sessions that were held during a week, and the students sent the answers of these exercises individually to the researcher. The students took the posttest one month after the last session. The instruments used were demographic profile and the reliable and valid Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS). Data analysis was performed using SPSS 16 through descriptive statistics (frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (paired t-test). In order to comply with ethical considerations, after obtaining permission from the ethics committee of Iran University of Medical Sciences, along with obtaining written consent from the samples, they were told that the information contained in the tools would remain confidential and there would be no obligation to participate in the research.The results of paired t-test showed that the positive emotions of the nursing students in the posttest with a mean score of 37.2 ± 9.5 was significantly higher than the pretest with a mean score of 21.24 ± 2.36, which indicates the superiority of the numerical indicators of positive emotion (P=0.001; t=23.388). Also, the results of paired t-test on negative emotions showed that the posttest score (12.2 ± 44.5) was significantly lower than the pretest score (20.34 ± 1.72), which indicates the superiority of the numerical indicators of negative emotion of nursing students (P<0.001; t=19.89). The results indicated that in the posttest, the scores of positive emotions increased significantly in all the time dimensions, while the scores of negative emotions decreased significantly.

The results of present study show that self-compassion-based education was effective on reducing negative emotions of nursing students, and therefore, affirm the research hypothesis that self-compassion-based education can increase the positive emotion scores and decrease negative emotion scores in the posttest. Based on the results of the research, self-compassion education can be employed as a high capability method for increasing positive emotions and reducing negative emotions of nursing students. The results of this study are useful for counseling centers of medical universities to better manage counseling for students. In the field of nursing students' education, the self-compassion training content presented in this study can be provided to nursing professors to acquaint their students with this content and these students can use this content as much as possible in their care plans for clients as self-compassion is a concept that applies to both healthy and sick groups in society. It is suggested that similar studies be performed on nursing students in other medical universities of the country and also on other fields of medical sciences to compare their results.