Matheson, Siobhan2025-07-212025-07-212025https://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/73230The demanding nature of psychologists’ work and their exposure to distressing content, puts them at high risk of experiencing stress outcomes. Self-care is widely accepted as important for preventing stress outcomes such as burnout; however, surprisingly few studies have investigated the link between self-care and burnout among psychologists. Further, despite ethical imperatives to engage in self-care, psychologists tend to have a chronic disregard for their own needs and limited research has investigated factors that increase psychologists' engagement in self-care. One promising factor that may enhance self-care and buffer burnout is self-compassion. Prior research within other helping professionals has linked self-compassion with promoting self-care and reducing burnout. However, almost no research has investigated the benefit of self-compassion for psychologists or considered the relationships between these three factors. This research explored self-compassion’s relationship with self-care and burnout in psychologists, as well as whether self-compassion was a moderator of the relationship between self-care and burnout. Currently registered and practicing New Zealand and Australian psychologists (n = 197) were recruited through convenience sampling. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that self-compassion had a significant, positive relationship with both professional and personal self-care in psychologist and that both self-compassion and self-care had significant, negative associations with burnout. Psychologists with greater self-compassion tended to have higher engagement in both professional and personal self-care along with lower levels of burnout. Moderation analysis showed that self-compassion was also a significant moderator of relationship between self-care and burnout, such that self-compassion strengthened the negative relationship that self-care had with burnout in psychologists. Specifically, as psychologists’ level of self-compassion gets higher, the negative relationship between self-care and burnout gets stronger. These results highlight self-compassion as a valuable resource for enhancing self-care practices and buffering burnout within psychologists. This research extends the finding that self-compassion is positively associated with self-care to a population of New Zealand and Australian psychologists, and it provides an initial foundation for new ways of looking at the relationship between self-care and burnout with respect to self-compassion.enThe authorThesis520302 Clinical psychology