Should I be kind to others or myself? : An intervention study of kindness and self-kindness on wellbeing

The aim of the current study is to better understand how kindness and self-kindness can help increase wellbeing by comparing an other-oriented and a self-oriented Acts of Kindness group to a waitlist control group and to each other. Furthermore, effect maintenance was studied using a six week follow-up. A single-blind randomised controlled design was used, containing three conditions: other-oriented Acts of Kindness (n = 43), self-oriented Acts of Kindness (n = 52) and the waitlist control group (n = 67). Participants were retrieved from the general Dutch population. Outcome measures were emotional, social, psychological and overall wellbeing from the MHC-SF which were measured directly before the intervention, directly after the intervention and six weeks after the intervention. The results show that other-oriented kindness has a significant positive effect on psychological wellbeing when compared to the waitlist control group. This effect is maintained until six week follow-up. Emotional, social and overall wellbeing did not significantly increase after the other-oriented kindness when compared to the waitlist control group. There were also no significant increases in outcome measures when comparing the self-oriented kindness with the waitlist control group. When comparing the other- and self-oriented interventions, there is no significant difference.