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BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognitive Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1576395
This article is part of the Research TopicSpirituality and Religion: Implications for Mental HealthView all 47 articles
Questionable evidence for prospective effects of self-compassion and burnout on spiritual well-being: A simulated reanalysis and comment on Lee and Fung (2024)
Provisionally accepted- Karolinska Institutet (KI), Solna, Sweden
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Objectives: The objective of the present simulated reanalysis was to scrutinize Lee and Fung’s conclusion that self-compassion and burnout have causal effects on spiritual well-being. Methodology: We simulated data to resemble the data used by Lee and Fung. We used triangulation and fitted complementary models to the simulated data. Findings: We found contradictory increasing, decreasing, and null effects of initial self-compassion and burnout on subsequent change in spiritual well-being.Conclusion: The present divergent findings indicated that it is premature to assume causal effects of self-compassion and burnout on spiritual well-being and the suggestions by Lee and Fung in this regard can be challenged.Implications: It is important for researchers to be aware that correlations, including adjusted cross-lagged effects, do not prove causality in order not to overinterpret findings, something that appears to have happened to Lee and Fung. We recommend researchers to triangulate by fitting complementary models to their data in order to evaluate if observed effects may be due to true causal effects or if they appear to be spurious.
Keywords: burnout, Cross-lagged panel model, self-compassion, simulation, Spiritual wellbeing, spurious prospective effects, Triangulation
Received: 13 Feb 2025; Accepted: 14 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sorjonen and Melin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Kimmo Sorjonen, Karolinska Institutet (KI), Solna, Sweden
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