Impact of a group-based, compassion-focused treatment on shame and early life events among male prisoners

The current study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a group-based compassion-focused treatment on shame and early life events among male prisoners. This study was a quasi-experimental study, with pre-test, post-test, and three months follow-up. Thirty male prisoners participated in the current study (15 participants in the experimental group and 15 in the waitlist with random assignment). The experimental group includes an eight-session compassion-based treatment. The research instruments comprised The Early Life Experiences Scale, The Fears of Compassion Scale, The Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R), and the Other as Shamer scale (a subsection of the Internalized Shame Scale, Cook, 1993). Data analysis involved the application of repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVA), which SPSS-26 performed. At the baseline, there were no differences between groups about socio-demographic variables, shame ( p > 0.05), and early life events ( p > 0.5). Repeated measures ANOVA revealed a significant interaction effect between time and group for shame (F(312.91), p