Self-Compassion and Empathy Among College Students: Enhancing Emotional Resilience and Well-Being – A Descriptive Study

Abstract

Background: Emotional well-being and resilience together with interpersonal relationships exist among college students through the necessary psychological constructs of self-compassion and empathy. The range of academic and social and personal issues confronting college students requires studying how self-compassion together with empathy supports their stress management. Aim: The research aims to evaluate self-compassion levels together with empathy in college students because these traits boost mental health and coping abilities as well as relationship development. Methods: The research utilized a descriptive quantitative research design to proceed. The researcher used simple random sampling to pick 40 college students attending Bishop Heber College in Trichy. The questionnaire consisted of demographic inquiries alongside the Compassion Scale (Pommier, Neff, & Tóth-Király, 2019) and the Perth Empathy Scale (Brett, 2023) with their respective 5-point scaling. The research design included primary data from survey participants together with secondary data sources from journals, books and articles. The Simple Table Method served to detect relationships among data sets during analysis. Results: The research analysis showed that women made up 58% of the total respondents while 52.5% of participants came from the 21-year-old age group. A substantial number of 47.5% students were pursuing the Master of Social Work program combined with 57.5% participants who had one sibling in addition to 45% students who were first-born children. The participants consisted primarily of nuclear families at 90% and divided equally between urban (45%) and rural (45%) locations while 30% earned a monthly household income of less than ₹1,00,000. Research data showed that a strong majority of 60% possessed low self-compassion and 50% had minimal empathy among the study participants. The study data indicates that academic institutions need specialized programs to build students’ self-compassion abilities and empathy skills so they develop stronger emotional protection and relationships among themselves. Conclusion: The research findings demonstrate that self-compassion along with empathy play essential roles in developing emotional resilience while managing stress and fostering social connections in college students. These findings underline the necessity of organized psychological training initiatives to strengthen emotional traits at educational institutions because it leads to better individual achievement and academic outcomes.