Comparison of university students who experienced the death of a parent and those who did not in terms of self-compassion and difficulty in emotion regulation

Abstract

Against a background of scarce research into the relationship between difficulty in emotion regulation and self-compassion among bereaved populations, the aim of this study was to examine self-compassion and difficulty in emotion regulation among university students who had experienced the death of a parent (n = 150) and those who had not (n = 474). It was found that the self-compassion scores of the university students with a deceased parent were significantly lower than the scores of those with living parents. Similarly, university students whose parent had passed away had higher scores for difficulty in emotion regulation than students who had not lived through that trauma. Our results show that for university students losing a parent may be associated with less self-compassion and more difficulties in emotion regulation. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.