Healing through helping: an experimental investigation of kindness, social activities, and reappraisal as well-being interventions

Social connection is vital to well-being and is often impaired among individuals with anxiety or depressive disorders, yet CBT techniques may be ineffective at improving social connection (Hofmann et al., 2014). Acts of kindness may more effectively improve social connection and related dimensions of well-being than prevailing CBT techniques. In this study, we randomly assigned individuals with elevated anxiety or depression symptoms (N = 122) to engage in acts of kindness (AK), social activities (SA), or thought records, i.e., cognitive reappraisal (CR). Multilevel modeling revealed that improvement was greater in the AK group than the CR and SA groups for social connection, and improvement was greater in the AK group than the CR group for depression/anxiety symptoms and life satisfaction. Time-lagged analyses indicated that public self-absorption mediated the effects of AK. These results converge with prior experiments to demonstrate the advantages of acts of kindness over prevailing CBT techniques.