Compassion’s Relational Nature: Ecological Momentary Assessment of the Three Flows of Compassion and Connection

Compassion is often thought of as a quiet, internal feeling—a softening of the heart when we see suffering, whether in ourselves or in someone else. For a long time, scientists studying this feeling have looked at it in pieces. They have measured how kind we are to ourselves, how kind we are to others, and how we feel when others are kind to us, treating these as separate habits or personality traits. But there is a growing sense that compassion is not a static trait we simply possess, but a living, breathing process that flows between us and the world around us. This flow is deeply tied to a sense of connection, that subjective feeling of belonging to something larger than oneself. When we feel connected, we often feel safer and more open; when we are compassionate, we often feel more linked to others. Understanding how these feelings move and change from moment to moment in our daily lives could reveal how they support our mental health and our ability to care for one another.

To explore this, a team of researchers from the Universitat de València in Spain set out to watch compassion in action, not in a laboratory, but in the real world. They invited 152 adults to carry out a ten-day experiment using a smartphone app. Instead of asking people to remember how they felt over the last month, the researchers interrupted their day five times a day with a gentle notification. When the phone buzzed, the participants answered four simple questions about what had happened since the last time they were asked. They rated how much they had treated themselves with care, how much they had treated others with care, how open they had been to receiving care from others, and how much they felt connected to the world around them. This method, known as ecological momentary assessment, allowed the scientists to see the immediate, shifting landscape of human emotion as it unfolded in real time, capturing the tiny ripples of feeling that happen between morning coffee and evening dinner.

The researchers were particularly interested in the direction of these feelings. They wanted to know if feeling connected to others made people more likely to be compassionate later on, or if being compassionate made people feel more connected. They also wondered if the way people usually think about themselves—specifically, whether they hold on tightly to a rigid sense of "I" or can step back and see themselves with a bit of distance—would change how these feelings interacted. By using a sophisticated statistical approach that maps how variables influence one another over time, the team could trace the paths these emotions took as they moved from one moment to the next.

The results painted a picture of a dynamic system where self-compassion played a unique and central role. The data showed that when a person treated themselves with kindness and tolerance at one moment, it was likely to lead to a small but measurable increase in their feeling of connection to others in the very next check-in. It also suggested that being kind to oneself made it slightly more likely that they would be kind to others, or open to receiving kindness from them, shortly afterward. In fact, self-compassion was the only feeling that seemed to predict an increase in all the other feelings, acting as a kind of internal spark that could light up the rest of the system. This suggests that the ability to be gentle with oneself might be a crucial foundation for opening up to the world and feeling part of it.

Interestingly, the study found that the reverse was also true, but only for specific parts of the system. When people felt a strong sense of connection to others, it tended to lead to them being kinder to themselves and kinder to other people in the following moments. However, feeling connected did not seem to predict whether a person would be open to receiving kindness from others. The researchers noted that receiving compassion often depends on specific external events—like a friend offering a hug or a stranger holding a door—rather than just an internal feeling of belonging. This implies that while connection can nurture our ability to give and receive care, the actual act of receiving it might rely more on the immediate circumstances of our day.

The study also looked at whether the way people usually view themselves changed these patterns. The researchers hypothesized that people who held a very rigid, fixed sense of self might struggle to let these feelings flow as easily as those who could step back and view themselves with flexibility. However, the data did not support this idea. The strength of the connections between compassion and feeling linked to others did not seem to depend on how rigidly a person identified with themselves. Instead, the study found that these patterns varied significantly from person to person in ways that the researchers could not yet explain. Some people showed strong links between their feelings, while others showed very weak ones, suggesting that there is no single "right" way for compassion to work in every human life.

At the same time the researchers looked at how feelings changed over hours, they also examined how they coexisted in the same moment. They found that whenever a person felt a surge of connection, they were also likely to feel a surge of compassion in all three directions: toward themselves, toward others, and from others. These feelings seemed to rise and fall together, like waves in the same ocean, reinforcing the idea that they are all expressions of the same deep human need for safety and bonding. This simultaneous rise suggests that the link between compassion and connection might happen very quickly, perhaps faster than the two-hour gaps between the phone notifications could capture.

The study concludes that compassion is not a set of isolated skills but a relational process that is deeply intertwined with our sense of belonging. While the researchers could not prove that one feeling causes another with absolute certainty, the patterns they observed suggest that self-compassion is a powerful starting point. By learning to be kind to oneself, a person may inadvertently create the internal conditions necessary to feel more connected to the world and more open to the care of others. The findings also highlight that while group averages can show general trends, every individual experiences these emotional flows differently. This means that helping people cultivate compassion might require looking at their unique, personal patterns rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach. Ultimately, the study offers a glimpse into the quiet, moment-to-moment mechanics of the human heart, showing how a simple act of self-kindness can ripple outward to touch our connection with everyone else.