Self-Compassion as a Facet of Neuroticism? A Reply to the Comments of Neff, Tóth-Király, and Colosimo (2018)

In this paper, we respond to comments by Neff et al. (2018) made about our finding that the negative dimensions of self-compassion were redundant with facets of neuroticism (rs ≥ 0.85; Pfattheicher et al., 2017) and not incrementally valid. We first provide epistemological guidance for establishing psychological constructs, namely, three hurdles that new constructs must pass: theoretically and empirically sound measurement, discriminant validity, and incremental validity—and then apply these guidelines to the self-compassion scale. We then outline that the critique of Neff et al. (2018) is contestable. We question their decisions concerning data-analytic methods that help them to circumvent instead of passing the outlined hurdles. In a reanalysis of the data provided by Neff et al. (2018), we point to several conceptual and psychometric problems and conclude that self-compassion does not overcome the outlined hurdles. Instead, we show that our initial critique of the self-compassion scale holds and that its dimensions are best considered facets of neuroticism.