Self-Compassion and Life Satisfaction across Cultures: Comparing Indian and Turkish Youths

The study explores cross-cultural differences between India and Turkey in self-compassion and life satisfaction in college going youths. Self-compassion is a self-attitude construct derived from Buddhist psychology (Neff, 2003a) and life satisfaction is overall satisfaction with one’s life. One hundred and seventy six college going students (mean age 21.18 years: SD =1.80) voluntarily participated in the research. Hundred participants from India (females 69%) and 76 from Turkey (females 44.7%) filled the Self Compassion Scale (SCS; Neff, 2003) and The Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS; Diener, Emmnos, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985). SCS has six subscales and 26 items (Self kindness, Self judgment, Common humanity, Isolation, Mindfulness and Over-identification) and SWLS has 5 items. The obtained results indicated moderate levels of self-compassion in both the cultures and youths in both cultures are “slightly satisfied” with their lives. The two cultures do not differ significantly on self-compassion or life satisfaction scores. Previous research has found differences in life satisfaction as well as self- compassion in Collectivistic versus Individualistic cultures (Birkett, 2013; Neff, 2003). Self-compassion and life satisfaction scores are not significantly correlated in the present study across the two cultures. The high convergence on both self-compassion and life satisfaction indicate that both self-compassion and life satisfaction are stable across the two Asian cultures. Comparing our findings with those of independent cultures (like USA) may help in understanding the differences in cultural notions of kindness towards self and life satisfaction in interdependent cultures like India and Turkey.