The Role of self-compassion and academic stress: Mediated intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

The main objective of this study was to investigate the role of self-compassion, intrinsic, and extrinsic motivation in predicting academic stress among college students. Research method was correlation. This study was conducted based on 558 students selected from Mahabad Islamic Azad University during 2012-13 academic years using random simple sampling. Measurement tools included a demographic checklist, self-compassion (Neef, 2003), achievement goals-orientation questionnaire (Elliot, & Mcgregor, 2001) and students’ academic stress (Kohn, & Frazer, 1986). To measure variance homogeneity and outliers’ data, mahalanobis distance strategy, correlation matrix and regression analyses were administrated. Correlation matrix indicated that correlation between variables of intrinsic motivation and self-compassion with academic stress had negative significant correlation; that is, findings demonstrated that self-compassion played a significant role in predicting students’ internal motivation; as well as intrinsic motivation played a significant mediate role between self-compassion and academic stress. Consequently, the increase of self-compassion and intrinsic motivation exerted a significant effect on reducing academic stress.