Social connectedness as a mediator between self-compassion and psychological distress in adolescents

Psychological Distress is a condition of negative feelings that can be caused by psychological conditions, social and physical disorders that result in the emergence of negative emotions, disrupting psychosocial functions to trigger various maladaptive behaviors. Self-Compassion as a psychological component that encourages individuals to create feelings of compassion towards oneself, leads to foster human attitudes when facing adversity. Social connectedness is the ability of a person to develop feelings of connectedness with his social and environment and act in a broader experience by guiding feelings, thoughts, and behavior, especially in social situations. Self-Compassion is suspected to have an influence on low distress if mediated by high social connectedness. The design of this study is quantitative non-experimental using adaptations from original Psychological Instruments, Self-Compassion and Social Connectedness. This study involved 196 participants who were selected by non-random sampling technique with a purposive sampling model. The results showed 4 findings: 1) there is a positive effect between Self Compassion on Social Connectedness, 2) there is a negative effect of Social Connectedness on Psychological Distress, 3) there is a negative effect between Self compassion on Psychological Distress (4) Self Compassion indirectly effect Psychological distress in adolescents through Social Connectedness.