To The City of a Hundred Spires: Taking New Self-Compassion Research in Dance to Prague

PhD student, Emma Morgan, shares plans to present her latest research findings.

On 13th October 2026, I will be travelling to Prague to present our latest research at the Compassion, Acceptance and Mindfulness in Dance and Performing Arts Conference. Our presentation, “How Self-Compassionate are UK Undergraduate Dance Students? A Latent Profile Analysis” (Emma Morgan, Dr Mary Quinton, Prof Sanna Nordin-Bates, and Prof Jennifer Cumming), will explore patterns of self-compassion among undergraduate dance students, with the aim of understanding how these differences may help inform more tailored self-compassion approaches to support their well-being in higher education.

Hosted at the HAMU Gallery, Music and Dance Faculty, Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, the conference will bring together researchers and practitioners to explore compassion-, acceptance-, and mindfulness-based approaches in dance and the performing arts.

There is also something quite fitting about taking this research to Prague. Famously described as the “City of a Hundred Spires”, Prague’s skyline brings together many Baroque towers, Gothic spires, and ornate domes. Each architectural structure has its own history, design, and character, yet together the buildings form one distinctive cityscape.

This offers a useful analogy for thinking about our study. While undergraduate dance students share a common educational environment, they may differ in how they respond to the challenges they encounter within it. Just a Prague’s cityscape is created through varied combinations of architectural structure, self-compassion may be expressed through different combinations of its component parts, creating distinct patterns of experience across dancers.

Understanding Different Experiences of Self-Compassion in Dance

We are beginning to learn more about why self-compassion may be a promising psychological resource for dancers. Emerging research links self-compassion with a range of positive psychological outcomes, including well-being (Walton et al., 2025), as well as lower social physique anxiety and fear of negative evaluations (Tarasoff et al., 2017; Zafeiroudi et al., 2022). Other research has highlighted the relevance of self-compassion to some common challenges dancers may face, particularly perfectionism. For example, higher evaluative perfectionism has been associated with lower self-compassion and higher burnout among dancers (Fletcher & Calmerio, 2026).

These findings are important, but they only tell us part of the story so far.

Much of the existing research on self-compassion in performance settings has focused on examining overall average levels of self-compassion (Cormier et al., 2025). While average scores can help us identify broad trends and relationships with other psychological constructs, average scores can hide important differences in how individuals specifically express self-compassion. And when it comes to self-compassion, these differences may matter.

As Dr Kristen Neff’s work highlights, self-compassion is not simply one thing (Neff, 2003). Self-compassion comprises six interrelated components:

• Self-kindness vs. self-judgement

• Common humanity vs. isolation

• Mindfulness vs. over-identification

These components work together, but they do not always move in step (Neff, 2016). In other words, two people with a similar overall self-compassion score can have quite varied combinations of compassionate and uncompassionate self-responding.

What might this look like for a dance student?

Consider two dance students with the same overall self-compassion score:

Dance Student A	High mindfulness Low self-kindness Moderate common humanity	When something goes wrong in class (e.g., falling out of a pirouette) they can notice when they are struggling and stay aware of what they are experiencing. Yet, even while they find it easier to have balanced awareness in difficult moments, they still respond to themselves critically rather than with warmth and encouragement.
Dance Student B	High common humanity Low mindfulness Moderate self-kindness	They understand that making mistakes is something that all dancers can experience from time to time. However, when emotions run high after a challenging dance class, they may find it difficult to step back from the experience and remain balanced with their feelings in the moment.

So, on the surface the two dance students might appear to have a very similar level of self-compassion, but looking a little closer reveals that they actually express self-compassion in quite different ways.

And this distinction has important implications beyond how we measure self-compassion in dance.

In practice, recognising these different patterns of self-compassion may also help dance educators more carefully consider how they support self-compassion in their dance students. What helps one student strengthen a particular component of self-compassion may not be as effective for another student depending on their particular combination of compassionate and uncompassionate self-responding.

Curious to learn more about self-compassion and its relevance to dance more broadly? Take a look at our previous blog post here.

So, Why Focus the Research on Undergraduate Dance Students?

Undergraduate dance students navigate much more than technical dance training. As a large and diverse dance sub-population, they face many potential challenges and setbacks while developing their skills as dancers, balancing the demands of academic study, progressing through higher education, and beginning to prepare for a career in dance.

For UK undergraduate dancers, these challenges are unfolding within an increasingly uncertain higher education landscape, with dance course closures and wider funding cuts to the arts (One Dance UK, 2023). At the same time, concerns about undergraduate dance students’ mental health difficulties continue to grow. With the limited discipline-specific well-being support available within higher education dance, students may rely more heavily on their own psychological resource to manage the challenges and difficulties they encounter throughout their dance education.

This is where self-compassion may come in.

Self-compassion is not about making dance training easier or removing the challenges students face. Rather, it may be a useful psychological resource that influences how students relate to the difficulties they encounter. In this sense, self-compassion may help undergraduate dancers respond to mistakes and setbacks with greater kindness and perspective, supporting them to be able move through difficulty, re-focus following setbacks, and to continue to progress through their dance education effectively.

The Important Bit: What Did We Actually Do?

The study examined whether different patterns of self-compassion existed among students, and how these patterns related to perfectionism and perfectionistic climate perceptions. To explore this, we collected in-person survey data collected from 326 undergraduate dance students from 10 different UK higher education dance programmes.

We then used latent profile analysis, a person-centred approach, that allowed us to look beyond an overall self-compassion score and identify sub-groups of students with different patterns across the six self-compassion components.

Key Findings at a Glance…

• Three distinct self-compassion profiles were identified, demonstrating that students’ self-compassion significantly differed.

• Over half of students (61.4%) demonstrated an Inconsistently Self-Supportive profile, suggesting that many undergraduate dancers experienced a combination of self-compassionate and uncompassionate self-responding.

• Self-compassion profiles differed significantly in perfectionistic concerns and perceived perfectionistic climate, but not in perfectionistic strivings, indicating that self-compassion is not only shaped by students’ self-critical tendencies, but also by how they perceive their dance learning environment.

What insights can we gain from this research?

One of the key messages we will highlight in the presentation is that self-compassion among undergraduate dance students is not simply characterised by high or low levels. Instead, our findings provide novel evidence of distinct self-compassion profiles among dance students, reflecting different combinations of compassionate and uncompassionate self-responding.

A particularly noteworthy finding is that the largest group of students fell into the Inconsistently Self-Supportive profile. This result is interesting because these students showed a mixture of more compassionate and less compassionate ways of responding to themselves simultaneously. In other words, self-compassion was not simply present or absent, but it appeared in a more complex configuration. This holds theoretical significance for future research by extending understanding beyond an overall self-compassion level to consider how its subscale components may combine in potentially complex ways in dancers.

Our presentation findings will also suggest that we need to look beyond the individual dance student when studying self-compassion in this population. Self-compassion may be shaped not only by how students relate to themselves, but also how they experience the environment around them. The differences we found in perceived perfectionistic climates provide one indication for why context may be just as important to consider when adopting self-compassion approaches.

So, what might this mean in practice?

Our findings suggest that self-compassion support for dance students may benefit from moving beyond a one-size-fits-all approach towards more tailored and targeted approaches. This can begin with small changes in the dance studio learning context.

One possible starting point for dance educators could be to integrate individualised self-compassion prompts and questions into reflective activities and written logs that students already use in their dance learning modules.

For example:

Self-Compassion Profile	Goal of Reflection	Example of Reflective Prompt Question
Dance Student A High mindfulness Low self-kindness Moderate common humanity	To interrupt self-criticism and practice responding with warmth and encouragement	Reflect: What critical words did I say to myself when I struggled in class today? Respond: How can I re-write that thought to be as warm and encouraging as I would be to a friend?
Dance Student B High common humanity Low mindfulness Moderate self-kindness	To practice pausing and noticing how difficulty emotions show up in the body	Reflect: When my emotions ran high in class today, what did I notice in my bodily reactions? Respond: What is one small way I can pause and use movement to help me reconnect with a sense of balance awareness with my emotions next time?

Final Thoughts

As we prepare to take this research to Prague, perhaps this is where our cityscape analogy comes back in. Just as Prague’s skyline is made up of many buildings with varied shapes, sizes, and styles, our findings show that self-compassion can also take different forms, with its components combining in distinct configurations across dance students.

Join us in Prague to learn more!

Stay tuned for a second blog post later in the year, where we will share an infographic of the self-compassion profiles identified in our study. This will include practical recommendations for supporting different patterns of self-compassion in dance students.

To explore more about research from the SPRINT Project, visit our website. You can also revisit our previous blog post on self-compassion in dance, which includes a downloadable PDF infographic resource: Unlocking Self-Compassion in Dance: An Infographic Resource for the Studio and Beyond.

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Written by Emma Morgan (PhD Student in the SPRINT Project)

References

Cormier, D. L., Kowalski, K. C., Ferguson, L. J., Mosewich, A. D., McHugh, T. L. F., & Röthlin, P. (2025). Self-compassion in sport: A scoping review. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 18(1), 154-193. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750984X.2022.2161064

Fletcher, E., & Calmeiro, L. (2026). Burnout, Emotional Intelligence, and Self-compassion across Perfectionism Profiles of Dancers. Journal of Dance Education, 26(2), 186-199. https://doi.org/10.1080/15290824.2025.2495743

Neff, K. D. (2003). Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude toward oneself. Self and identity, 2(2), 85-101. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298860309032

Neff, K. D. (2016). The self-compassion scale is a valid and theoretically coherent measure of self-compassion. Mindfulness, 7(1), 264-274. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-015-0479-3

One Dance UK. (2023). Taking it higher: Dance in HE [Report]. https://www.onedanceuk.org/media/rz1hw55k/he-report-2023.pdf

Tarasoff, L., Ferguson, L., & Kowlaski, K. (2017). Self-compassion in an evaluative dance environment. University of Saskatchewan Undergraduate Research Journal, 3(1), 1-11.

Walton, C. C., Kirby, J. N., McKenzie, S., Gao, C. X., Purcell, R., Rice, S. M., & Osborne, M. S. (2025). A preliminary investigation into self-compassion and compassion-based intervention for mental health in the performing arts. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1512114. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1512114

Zafeiroudi, A., Chatzipanteli, A., Athanasiou, A. C., Tsartsapakis, I., Kopanou, A., & Kouthouris, C. (2022). Exploring Self-Compassion among Recreational Dancers: Differences Between Tango and Ballet-Dance Teaching Implications Through Somatic and Embodied Disciplines. Journal of Educational and Social Research, 12(6), 1-11. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.36941/jesr-2022-0140