Abstract: Exerting multiple negative impacts on college students, boredom proneness is worth exploring, its underlying factors in particular, as an understanding of it will improve mental health of the college students. Comprising three core components–self-kindness, common humanity, and mindful awareness–self-compassion constitutes an adaptive emotion regulation strategy while sense of meaning in life is the perception of object, value and importance of life of an individual. This study adopts a positive psychology perspective to examine the potential roles of self-compassion and sense of meaning in life in mitigating boredom proneness. This study administered the Self-Compassion Scale (SCS), Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ), and Boredom Proneness Scale-Short Form (BPS-SF) to university students, collecting 401 valid responses. Regression analysis and mediation tests revealed that: 1) self-compassion directly and negatively predicts boredom proneness; and 2) sense of meaning in life partially mediates the relationship between self-compassion and boredom proneness, accounting for 40.971% of the total effect. This indicates that self-compassion also indirectly reduces boredom proneness by enhancing the sense of meaning in life. The study demonstrates that in university mental health education, cultivating the students’ self-compassion through multifaceted approaches can effectively reduce their boredom proneness, thereby promoting psychological well-being.

Key words: self-compassion, boredom proneness, sense of meaning in life, mediating role, college student