Research Measures

Adapted Compassion Scales:

Close Other (CO) & Strangers/Humanity (S/H) Versions

The original Compassion Scale (Pommier, 2011) tested general self-reported compassionate love, without specifying a target group. I created these adapted versions of the scale in order to assess compassionate love toward in-group members and out-group members separately, while retaining the original facet structure.

Philosophy of Self Scale

I developed this scale in order to empirically assess for liberal individualism and strong relationality, which constitute ways that people envision the self in relation to others. These constructs were developed by Dr. Brent Slife and colleagues (e.g., Slife, O'Grady, & Kosits, 2017), and this scale retains the language used in their papers/chapters.

Religious Practices Scales

These scales were developed for use in our line of research on the associations between religious/spiritual practices and compassionate love. The scales were constructed after reviewing the psychological and religious studies literature and collecting dozens of items from various scales measuring religious/spiritual practices, mostly from Judeo-Christian and other monotheistic religious traditions. The objective in constructing these scales was to assess for the religious/spiritual practices people in the U.S. regularly engage in, casting as wide a net as possible, while recognizing that our lab's participants have a largely Christian background.

Stress Response Vacillation Scale

I developed this very brief scale in order to measure two common types of coping responses to stress: punitive self-control and unchecked indulgence. I hypothesized that low self-compassion might be associated with vacilation between these two poles of self-care, meaning that a person with low self-compassion might score highly on both punitive self-control items and unchecked indulgence items.

Career Preparation Scale

This scale was designed to quickly assess a university student’s current perception of their career preparedness. It was developed for use in an Honor’s program evaluation.