The Role of Self-Compassion and Body Perception in Predicting Psychological Safety.

Background/

Objectives

Psychological safety is increasingly recognized as a clinically relevant construct linked to emotional regulation, interpersonal functioning, and trauma-related processes. Emerging evidence suggests that psychological safety may depend not only on embodied experiences of bodily regulation but also on how individuals relate to themselves under conditions of distress. The present study investigated the role of self-compassion and body perception on psychological safety.

Methods

A total of 332 community participants were administered the Neuroception of Psychological Safety Scale (NPSS), the Body Perception Questionnaire-22 (BPQ-22), the Self-Compassion Scale-Short Form (SCS-SF), and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21). Spearman's correlations, hierarchical multiple regression analyses, and mediation analyses were conducted using SPSS to examine the relationships among the study variables.

Results

Psychological safety showed a moderate positive association with self-compassion and a weak negative association with body perception. Body perception was also negatively associated with self-compassion. In hierarchical regression models, self-compassion emerged as the strongest predictor of psychological safety, whereas the predictive effect of body perception became non-significant after self-compassion entered the model. Mediation analyses further demonstrated that self-compassion fully mediated the association between body perception and psychological safety.

Conclusions

The findings suggest that the relationship between bodily experience and psychological safety may primarily depend on individuals' capacity to respond to internal experiences with compassion directed towards oneself. Self-compassion may therefore represent a clinically relevant target for interventions aimed at enhancing psychological safety.