Responses over time
In contrast to Hypothesis 3, for both compassion and relaxation exercises, HRV data indicated a decreasing number of clinically-significant positive responses over the 3–4 sessions and an increasing number of reliably negative responses. This trend was more pronounced for CFI than relaxation. One possible explanation for this result is that it reflects boredom due to habituation, which may have been lower in the relaxation condition since it used forest and beach scenes alternately, whilst the CFI task was left unchanged. Clinicians might consider helping clients try different variations of a therapy task to avoid habituation during repeated homework sessions; although admittedly, boredom or frustration may have been inflated in the current context due to doing the task at pre-scheduled hours, rather than when a client might choose to practice. Repeated exposures seem not to be effective in reducing threat responses that might potentially arise during self-compassion imagery. This finding is in line with compassion-focused psychotherapy approaches, such as Compassion Focused Therapy, which highlights the importance of helping the client understand the nature and the origin of the resistances to specific flows of compassion and work compassionately with these inhibitors [