The Three Circles Model Put to the Test | Dylan Moloney-Gibb

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: "The Three Circles Model Put to the Test" | Compassion in a T-Shirt

Podcast: Compassion in a T-Shirt
Host: Dr. Stan Steindl
Guest: Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb
Date: July 10, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode explores a groundbreaking research study validating the "Three Circles" model in Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT), led by Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb and published in Behaviour Research and Therapy (April 2026). Dr. Gibb and Dr. Stan Steindl discuss the science behind the model—which breaks emotion regulation into threat, drive, and soothing systems—and the development of a digital Three Circles app. Together, they examine how these emotional systems relate to physiology (specifically heart rate variability), the implications for therapeutic practice and research, and the future of both the model and its applications.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is the Three Circles Model?

• Threat, Drive, Soothing: Emotions and motivations are organized into three interacting systems.
  • Threat (red): Negative emotion/alert (anger, fear, disgust), sympathetic nervous system ("fight or flight").
  • Drive (blue): Activated positive emotion (joy, excitement), sympathetic NS and dopamine (pursuing rewards/resources).
  • Soothing (green): Deactivated positive emotion (calmness, contentment), parasympathetic NS ("rest and digest").
• The model often uses colored circles (red, blue, green) in therapy to illustrate the emotional state.
• Dr. Gibb: “The idea is that emotions serve as motivation to respond to environmental stimuli.” (03:00)

2. The Digital Three Circles App

• Description: Digitizes the familiar CFT exercise of circle drawing to measure/track emotion in real time.
• Uses:
  • Therapeutic Tracking: Pre and post-exercise or session changes in emotional states.
  • Psychoeducation: Teaches users—especially in schools or clinical groups—to identify their emotional patterns.
  • Research: Outcome measurement, especially when linked with physiological data (e.g., HRV).
• “If you’ve been feeling particularly calm, you’ll draw a big green circle. … We were interested in operationalizing this.” —Dr. Gibb (05:28)
• Allows for easy, engaging, non-verbal self-report—useful across populations with varying emotional literacy.

3. Identifying the Scientific Gap

• Previous studies measured the three systems mainly with rating scales of discrete emotions.
• The novelty: No previous research directly measured the interactivity between the systems, nor validated the model’s alignment with physiological data in real-time.
• “Those systems aren’t existing in isolation. They interact and are meant to be responsive to environmental context.” —Dr. Gibb (09:35)

4. How the App Measures Emotion: Circle Dominance & Balance

• Circle Dominance: Percentage area of each circle, quantifying each system’s influence at a given moment.
• Interaction: Systems behave like a seesaw—the dominance of one naturally reduces the others.
• Why It Matters: Offers a holistic, dynamic snapshot of underlying motivational systems, not just static emotional states.
• “If you have more of one circle, you’re inherently going to have less of the other circles. That does sort of map to physiology as well.” —Dr. Gibb (11:49)

5. Soothing System: Not Just ‘Low Energy’

• Recent insights (from Paul Gilbert and others) suggest soothing’s role is broader than just calmness/rest—it undergirds attachment, emotion regulation, and even playfulness/exploration.
• “You can be chill while still having energy. And that’s the nature of the interaction between those systems.” —Dr. Gibb (15:44)

6. Study Design: Rest-Reactivity-Recovery (+ Compassion Task)

• Paradigm (Triple R):
  • Rest: Baseline
  • Reactivity: Rumination on a stressful event (activating threat)
  • Recovery: Return to baseline (emotion regulation)
  • Compassion exercise: Directing compassionate wishes (to close, neutral, and difficult others, and self)
  • After each phase, participants use the app to draw/resize the circles and HRV is measured.
• “Heart rate variability is a metric commonly used as a proxy for your parasympathetic nervous system—the rest and digest system.” —Dr. Gibb (17:50)

7. Research Results: Emotional & Physiological Validation

• Rest → Rumination: Threat dominance ↑, Drive dominance ↓, Soothing ↓ (non-significant).
  • “There was an increase in threat circle dominance… and a decrease in drive circle dominance.” —Dr. Gibb (23:18)
• Rumination → Recovery: Threat dominance ↓, Soothing dominance ↑, Drive unchanged.
  • “feels like that relief emotion … my soothing system can come back up.” —Dr. Gibb (24:00)
• Recovery → Compassion: Drive dominance ↑, threat/soothing stable—suggesting compassionate action involves drive, not just soothing.
  • “People were experiencing more positive activated emotions, like joy…” —Dr. Gibb (26:50)
• Heart Rate Variability (HRV): Closely tracked the Three Circles patterns—lower HRV during rumination (threat), recovery in HRV post-rumination, which correlates with soothing increases in the model.
  • “Those two metrics aligned.” —Dr. Gibb (29:12)
• Key Insight: The balance (ratio of soothing to other systems), not mere presence of soothing, is most relevant to emotion regulation and HRV.
  • “The ratio of not green to green appeared to be negatively correlated with heart rate variability…” (34:20)
• Imbalance variable (static standard deviation across circles) was not predictive—supporting a dynamic, context-responsive model.

8. Clinical and Research Implications

• Therapeutic Application:
  • Supports use of app for tracking emotion regulation and psychoeducation in therapy.
  • “The three circles is reflective of changes in physiology resulting from those experimental manipulations.” —Dr. Gibb (29:12)
• Special Populations:
  • Potentially valuable for clients with low emotional literacy (e.g., alexithymia, young offenders).
  • Noted that in some populations, soothing/compassion may provoke threat, suggesting nuanced application.
• Wider Research:
  • Opportunities to validate model/app in diverse settings (e.g., VR emotional training), special populations, and clinical interventions.
• “I think there are implications of our measure being particularly useful for those populations [with alexithymia] because they don’t have to … try and understand exactly which discrete emotion they’re experiencing.” —Dr. Gibb (40:23)

9. Big Picture: Brain States, Motivation, and Emotional Balance

• The three circles model doesn’t just represent “groups of emotions” but “patterns of brain and body functioning”—distinct motivational and physiological states.
• Validation of meaningful links between self-report (app) and physiology (HRV).
  • “We kind of established in this paper that those patterns of heart rate variability … coalesce with the ratings of the three circles.” —Dr. Gibb (42:52)

---

Memorable Quotes & Notable Moments

• On the Model’s Core Idea:

  "The idea is that emotions ... serve as motivation to respond to environmental stimuli."
  —Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb (03:00)

• On Clinical Utility:

  "You can use it … to assess the efficacy of different techniques that you might be utilizing in therapy. ... If your client came in and they had a big red circle at the start and ... a much smaller red circle at the end—whatever I did here, let's do more of that."
  —Dr. Gibb (06:15)

• On Measuring Balance:

  "Having just a standard like flat rate balance between the circles isn’t really compensating for your environmental stimuli."
  —Dr. Gibb (32:30)

• On Soothing’s Complexity:

  "I try not to use that term [‘low energy’]. … You can be chill while still having energy."
  —Dr. Gibb (15:44)

• On Research Motivation:

  "The three circles is reflective of changes in physiology resulting from those experimental manipulations."
  —Dr. Gibb (29:12)

• On Therapy Practicality:

  "We've done it, so you don't have to, hopefully. ... You can get some inkling as to how someone's autonomic nervous system is functioning from the three circles."
  —Dr. Gibb (42:52)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:33] Model basics and explanation of the Three Circles app
• [06:15] Clinical uses and rationale for digital adaptation
• [08:12] The scientific gap the study addresses
• [11:42] Explaining circle dominance and dynamic measurement over static balance
• [14:06] Soothing system: emotional and motivational complexity
• [17:45] Study design (rest, reactivity/rumination, recovery, compassion)
• [23:17] Results: Emotional changes across phases
• [29:12] Results: Heart rate variability and physiological validation
• [31:52] Importance of dynamic balance vs. static balance; ratio metrics
• [38:38] Implications for research, practice, and future directions
• [42:52] App vs. HRV in practice—what therapists can expect

---

Conclusion

This episode offers a rich exploration of the Three Circles model, both in theory and in experimental practice. Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb’s research provides compelling evidence that the model—especially when digitized in the new app—captures meaningful shifts in emotional and physiological regulation. The validation that self-report circle-use mirrors heart rate changes suggests a promising, accessible tool for therapists, clients, and researchers. The episode concludes with discussion of the model’s real-world impact, its fit for various populations, and exciting future research and intervention possibilities.

“It’s a simple model, in a way, and yet it actually encompasses some multiple layers of what it is to have a tricky brain, sort of.”
—Interviewer (16:41)

---

Transcript

[Dr. Stan Steindl]

Doctor Dylan Maloney Gibb is one of the brightest young compassion researchers I know, and it's been a real pleasure watching him develop into such an outstanding scientist. Hi, I'm Dr. Stan Steindl. Today I'm speaking with Dylan about his recent paper on the three Circles model of compassion focused therapy, published in Behaviour Research and Therapy. Dylan was the lead author alongside Chase Sherwell, Sasha Lynn and James Kirby. Dylan recently completed his PhD and is a researcher with the Compassionate Mind Research Group at the University of Queensland. His research focuses on one of the central ideas in compassion focused therapy, the Three Circles model of emotion regulation. Together with his colleagues, he's been helping to develop and validate the digital three Circles app, exploring how we can measure threat, drive and soothing in real time, and how these patterns relate to physiological measures such as heart rate variability. In this conversation, we unpack the research, what it tells us about the science behind the Three Circles model and what it might mean for therapists, researchers and anyone interested in understanding how our minds and bodies regulate emotion. And so I bring you Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb. Doctor Dylan Maloney Gibb, welcome to Compassion

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

in a T shirt.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, thanks for having me. I like compassion and T shirts, so I appreciate this.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

This is like your natural environment, man.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, 100%. It's appealing to all my interests, you know.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Recently you were lead author on a April 2026 paper so hot off the presses, the three circle model of compassion

[Dr. Stan Steindl]

Focused Therapy, an experimental paradigm to assess

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

dynamic psychophysiological changes of emotion regulation systems.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

So, yeah, that's the one. It's a mouthful. And if we'd known that someone was going to say it out loud, we probably would have shortened the title, but that's why we did that.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

That's why. That's why I thought I'd just sort of read it out to you. But. And I definitely want to dive into that paper, of course, and. And what you found there. But. But first, for people who maybe haven't seen it, there's now this digital three Circles app that lets people map their

[Dr. Stan Steindl]

emotional state, I guess.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Could you tell us a bit about

[Dr. Stan Steindl]

the app, what people can do with

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

it, why you think it might be a useful tool?

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, absolutely. So, obviously a presupposition of compassion focused therapy is the tripartite model of emotion and motivation, or the three Circle model, which basically breaks down your emotions into three systems that are linked to physiology, that are responsible for your experiences of emotion. The idea is that emotions, I guess, serve as motivation to respond to environmental stimuli. So your first system Your most important system obviously is your threat system. So that's responsible for your experiences of negative emotion. So anger, fear and disgust, for example. And you know, this system is running off your sympathetic nervous system, that arm of your autonomic nervous system, which is I guess colloquially referred to as the fight or flight system. So basically the idea is that these threat based emotions serve to incentivize you to respond to the threat, right? You know, to fight, flee, freeze or appease. So that that's one of your systems. And then you've got your drive system, which is responsible for your experiences of positive activated emotion. So that's like joy, for example, and that's running off your sympathetic nervous system as well. But also there's, you know, dopamine involvement in terms of the fact that, you know, when you're anticipating a reward, you know, you get a little dopamine hit. Um, and you know, the idea is that this system incentivizes you to go out and accumulate resources that are advantageous to you for your survival. So food, water, social standing, all of that. And then finally you've got your soothing system, which is not merely an absence of threatened drive, it's a distinct system in and of itself. So that's running off your, your parasympathetic nervous system, right? Your rest and digest system. And so this system is responsible for your experiences of deactivated positive emotion. So like calmness and contentment and satisfaction. And this system in particular is kind of like a crucial goal or stimulating the system is a crucial goal of compassion focused therapy. The idea is that if you stimulate your soothing system, you can sort of regulate less useful levels of threatened drive, which may be sort of contributing to psychological distress, for example. And I guess in terms of compassion focused therapy, a crucial sort of tool that's used in compassion focused therapy sessions, obviously, as you would know, is just drawing each of those systems as, you know, a different colored circle, right? So you've got green for your soothing and then blue for your drive and red for your threat. And the idea is that you draw them, you know, according to sort of how you've been feeling. You know, if you've been feeling particularly calm, you'll draw a big green circle. And so we were interested in sort of adapting this circle during practice employed in compassion focused therapy as a digital measure to sort of. Basically we were like, what if we operationalize this and we're able to sort of use it to measure emotion? So that was the rationale for the measure, and now we kind of validated it and it's going out. Obviously James has an app for it. Um, so there, you know, the potential uses, there's kind of like a plethora of them. So you can use it, you know, most basically like as you would with the circle drawing exercise in, in therapy to sort of, you know, track changes in emotion, you can use it to sort of assess the, the efficacy of different techniques that you might be utilizing in therapy. Right. So you can sort of go, oh, okay, well you know, my client came in this time and they had a big red circle at the start and by the end of it, you know, they had a much smaller red circle. So whatever I did here, let's do more of that. But you know, you can, you can use it in a variety of other contexts as well. So you can use it as a psycho educational tool to sort of, you know, help particularly I think in sort of educational environments, you know, schools, for example, to help kids understand their emotions and to understand their three systems. You can use it, I guess as sort of like an outcome measure in studies. And as we found in this paper, you can also use it within sort of heart rate variability studies to assess emotions alongside heart rate variability. So that was the kind of focus of this paper, was to assess whether this measure was sensitive to dynamic changes in emotion resultant from experimental manipulations.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Wow, great summary, mate. And it is really interesting. I feel like from a clinical point of view it really adds aids in mind awareness, I guess, isn't it? You know, being able to use the app to whether it's pre post an exercise or across a week or in different contexts or you know, being able to just have that moment to stop and reflect, draw the circles on the app, it kind of tracks them I think over time and you're left with sort of data there that, that can give you a sense of, you know, like what are your three circles doing over time? What's what might be the dominant kind of circle or the combination really, I think that's something we'll talk about in a bit later is just the way that it's actually in the combinational balance really across the three circles, which seems to be important. And it is a beloved model I guess in CFT and kind of really

[Dr. Stan Steindl]

practical, but until recently it hadn't really

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

been tested scientifically in a way. And so you've done a bit of a program of research. I mean, what was the gap really that your research was trying to fill?

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, 100%. So I guess those, the relations between the systems had been previously established Scientifically, in terms of like you had your, I think, the Pew and Marone Strapinski paper which established that, you know, your two types of positive affect, your soothing system and your drive system running off different arms of the autonomic nervous system. Right. So you've got your soothing system running off parasympathetic and your drive system running off of sympathetic. And you know, there's been a bunch of research in, in terms of measuring, you know, those three systems sort of, in terms of just, you know, standard, like it scales. So I was a real big fan of Sauser and colleagues, I think is how you pronounce Ruben's name over in Portugal at the University of Coimbra. So they'd done some, you know, basically some vignette studies using just sort of discrete emotions mapped to each one of those systems in terms of subscales. So, you know, you basically rate, I guess, like how much joy you're experiencing might be one of your discrete emotions mapped to your drive system. So stuff like that's been done. You have your easel as well, which does the same thing. It's sort of just rating different discrete emotions that are mapped to individual subscales based on those three systems. But up until now, no one really examined interactivity between those systems, which is particularly important in terms of, I guess, the theory inherent to compassion focused therapy. Because the idea is that you, according to the tripartite model, those systems aren't existing in isolation. They interact. And the idea is that they're meant to be sort of responding to environmental context. So that was mainly the gap we were trying to fill. There is to, I guess, get a measure of system interactivity and obviously to kind of do it in a way that is quite engaging and might sort of mitigate, I guess, caveats associated with traditional self report measures. So, you know, aspects like emotional or verbal literacy, you know, like my background was working with like young offenders and, and child safety kids, so children in care. And you know, sometimes they wouldn't necessarily know what discrete emotions they are experiencing. Right. You know, you don't know whether what you're experiencing is sort of anger or fear sometimes. Sometimes it can be a bit of both. And so we figured that basically by breaking it down into just, you know, those three systems, you don't necessarily have to be able to discern, you know, how much of each of those individual emotions you're experiencing. You can just sort of go, okay, I've got a big red circle, you know, so that was kind of the appeal there. And that was the literature, literature gap that we were trying to fill there. And then obviously with this paper we were trying to establish, you know, that those ratings of the three circles, you know, basically your ratings of emotion are corresponding to, you know, what's going on physiologically. Because again, according to compassion focused therapy theory, your emotions, you know, are inherently linked to your, your autonomic nervous system.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Just unpack a bit more for us. The, the advantage of sort of resizing these three circles, you know, I guess there's, there's a lot underneath that in a sense. And, and you know, like what, what, what's that really measuring? And why might it tell us something that perhaps the traditional questionnaires might miss?

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, absolutely. So in terms, I guess that kind of goes into what our measure is actually measuring there, like the quantitative units, I guess. And so the big one for us in terms of that measure is circle dominance. So basically it's calculated by, you take your area of one circle and then just divide it by the summed area of all your circles, which sort of converts it to a percentage and basically tells you how much your circle of interest is making up the total picture comprised of all three circles. Right. And then the idea is that they're kind of anchored to each other. Right. So if you have more of one circle, you're inherently going to have less of the other circles. And that does sort of map to physiology as well, where it's sort of like, you know, your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems can kind of act is like a seesaw. And so obviously with, you know, with regards to exercises employed in compassion focused therapy, the big ones are kind of like soothing or compassion based exercises which works on the principle of trying to activate your parasympathetic nervous system to sort of down regulate, you know, less useful levels of sympathetic activity, you know, when it might not be particularly useful. So in terms of what that's measuring there, when measuring, I guess, the balance between those systems, which is I guess a crucial assumption of the tripartite model.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Okay, yeah, circle dominance in a way, and that's the circle that really is occupying the most percentage of the area is sort of the circle dominance. And if soothing system is kind of the, the dominant system, then that might, yeah, sort of suggest something in particular about the current emotional state. I noticed you said earlier on calm and rest and digest and those sorts of things. I see recently Paul Gilbert's been really clarifying that too about also the sometimes activating aspects of soothing system as well. And that soothing system might also be related to play or, you know, exploring or, you know, things like that. Did you have any comments on some

[Dr. Stan Steindl]

of those recent thoughts?

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, well, I guess for me it's sort of like. What's particularly interesting or pertinent about the soothing system is that it co. Develops alongside emotion regulation and attachment. Right. Because that kind of, you know, it makes sense in hindsight where it's like, well, you can't develop a stable attachment to a caregiver in an environment of threat. Right. Your threat system is kind of dominant in that situation and consequently that can basically that's implicated in later instances of difficulties with emotion regulation. So I guess what I'm trying to say there is that the soothing system isn't necessarily as simple as just like, oh, it's soothing or it's just like low energy. Like it has a variety, you know, it's implicated in a variety of functions. And play is a big one as well, because that is how you bond with caregivers a lot of the time or even friends, you know. So it does make a lot of sense that, you know, the soothing system would be involved in instances of play. So. Fully agree with Paul on that one.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sort of. Not just low energy. I think that's probably a really important takeaway that it can be also sort of energy giving and activating and, and, you know, and. But if we bring it back to that kind of attachment system as a, as a nice little kind of thing to anchor some of those ideas, that it actually makes a lot of sense.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

And, and that's why when I'm sorry to interrupt, but I was just gonna say because I thought of it then and I was like, yeah, that's also why when I'm like, you know, when I'm describing the soothing system, you know, sometimes people will go like, low energy, positive emotion. And I try not to use that term for that reason. I'll use like deactivated positive emotion. Right. Obviously, I guess, like there's the same there, but I think there is sort of, you know, that, that connotation of like, oh, you know, the, the soothing system is inherently low energy, you know, and, and I don't think that's the case at all. Like, you know, you can be chill while still having energy. Right. And that's the nature of the interaction between those systems.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

And then of course, even if soothing system is the dominant system, there'll be elements potentially of threat and drive that are still, you know, in, in the bigger picture as well. So I guess it's all. It's quite complex really, isn't it? It's a simple model in a way, and yet it actually encompasses some multiple layers of what it is to. To have a tricky brain, sort of.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, so I was gonna say it was like many such cases. Right. You know. Yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

So in your study you used, I think this is it like the triple R paradigm. Rest, rumination and recovery.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Technically, rest, reactivity and rec. Like what we used was a rumination task. But reactivity just means sort of like whatever stimulus you're utilizing to sort of provoke a physiological response.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

So the triple R is rest reactivation and recovery.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Rest, reactivity and recovery.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Rest, reactivity and recovery. And you just happened to conveniently use another R, which was rumination, for the reactivity as part of it.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

We like to keep things confusing so that I can correct people on podcasts and see.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Thank you. Just correct me. But without too much shame would be good.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Exactly.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Well, anyway, yes, well, tell us, talk us through the design and how you came up with that to test your hypotheses.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, absolutely, sir. I guess in terms of measuring heart rate variability, I guess for like the three people watching home. No, you have more than me. If I was running it, it'd be like three people. But yeah, basically heart rate variability is a metric commonly used as, like a proxy for your parasympathetic nervous system, so your rest and digest system. So the idea is that, you know, basically when, when you're chiller, you tend to have more heart rate variability, more variability in the interbeat intervals. So I guess like the, the gaps between your heartbeats. So that's effectively what heart rate variability is measuring. But static measures of heart rate variability don't necessarily tell you a whole lot. It's sort of more the contrast between rest and reactivity. That's sort of basically how you're actually able to gauge, you know, the, the effectiveness of your, your parasympathetic nervous system kicking in. Right. So resting measures of heart rate variability, you know, vary quite a lot between participants and sort of subject to a whole bunch of factors that can create noise. So any sort of like pre existing health conditions, whether you've had caffeine, all of that can affect your sort of resting heart rate variability. So the idea is that you want to, I guess, like provoke reactivity in your experimental paradigm, you know, to accurately gauge, you know, the activity of your parasympathetic nervous system. So it's kind of like a gold standard practice for measuring heart rate variability. So we went for, yeah, the rest reactivity recovery paradigm. So basically, you just get people to come in, you get them to sit for like six minutes and, you know, don't think about anything in particular, don't do anything particular. You just wait there and then. In our case, we wanted to provoke, I guess, like the sympathetic nervous system. So we used a rumination task where you basically just think about something stressful that's happened and kind of dwell on it, with the idea being that it'll kind of activate your threat system and your sympathetic nervous system, and that'll show up in your heart rate variability readings, and then you have recovery afterwards, you know, to basically examine how, you know, your heart rate variability theoretically should increase again after the rumination because you're no longer sort of exposed to a stressful stimulus. And then we also chuck the compassion task at the end as well, just because obviously the assumption of compassion tasks is that's how they work. Right? You know, basically they'll, you know, activate your soothing system, which will consequently result in reduced sympathetic activity because it's stimulating your parasympathetic nervous system. So that's why we wanted to chuck the compassion task at the end there.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

What was the compassion task?

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, so the idea of that compassion task was to sort of think about different people in succession. So you first start with someone who you're quite close to, who it's easy to feel compassion for, and then you just basically try and direct compassionate wishes to them. So wishing that they would be free from suffering, understanding that they're sort of navigating life's tricky waters the same as anyone else, they have good days and bad days, and then successively attempting to impart those wishes on people that you might find that you're more distant from. So maybe a neutral person, like someone that you don't know that well, that you've maybe served you coffee earlier or something like that, and then maybe someone that you're struggling with who it would be harder to generate compassionate wishes for. So that was the task there was

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

their compassion directed to the self in that sequence?

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yes, we did direct those compassionate wishes to the self as well.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

And I think you mentioned the heart rate variability being sort of measured along the way. People were also using the app, though, weren't they, across those. How did that bit of it work?

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

So basically we would get them to come in and then, you know, before, after the baseline period, they would, you know, resize the three circles according to how they'd been feeling. And they do that, you know, a lot. Like, basically after each. Each phase of the experiment. So it was like post baseline, resize the three circles. After the rumination task, resize the three circles. After the recovery period, resize them. And then after the compassion task. Idea was that, you know, in measuring the. The three circles after each period or, or after each experimental phase, you know, examining sort of the relation of those ratings with the. The heart rate variability rating. Heart rate variability metrics for each of those phases and. And seeing if they kind of coalesce.

[Dr. Stan Steindl]

Yeah, cool. Okay.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

So. So it's kind of an ABA design, isn't it?

[Dr. Stan Steindl]

Where.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Where we're trying to see what. What the heart rate variability. And the three circles is kind of at rest. And then there's this sort of activity of, in this case, rumination over a stressful life experience, and then a return to rest or recovery followed by the compassion exercise and measuring the three circles as well at the end of each of those phases. So let's get to the results. I mean, did the three circles. Let's start with that. Perhaps the three circles. And did they sort of kind of behave in the way that CFT or

[Dr. Stan Steindl]

your hypotheses might have predicted?

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, for the most part. So we basically found from baseline to rumination, there was an increase in threat circle dominance. Right. So that makes sense because you're ruminating. Right. That's what it's meant to do. It's meant to trigger your threat system. And then we found a decrease in drive circle dominance. So a decrease in positive activated emotion, which also makes sense. Like you're not experiencing a whole bunch of joy. Theoretically, if you're thinking about something stressful, we didn't find a difference in terms of the soothing system or the green circle. It still decreased. It just wasn't significant. So it could be the case that if we had more power, that would have reached significance. Or perhaps participants came in and they weren't feeling particularly soothed at baseline. Who knows with regards to that one? But then from, I guess, the reactivity or the rumination to recovery, we found a decrease in threat circle dominance, which again, makes sense. Like you take away the negative stimulus or your rumination and consequently your threat system is going to decrease because it's no longer sort of basically being stimulated. And then we also found an increase in green circle dominance or soothing circle dominance. So this is from rumination and recovery. Again, it's kind of like that relief emotion, right, where it's like, okay, I'm not currently in a state of threat, so my soothing system can come back up. It could also be the Case that our participants started employing emotion regulation strategies of their own already in that instance, maybe they're already reappraising their emotions. We didn't find a change in drive circle dominance there, but that it wasn't sort of. You wouldn't necessarily expect to. And then in terms of the change from recovery to compassion, we actually didn't find a whole lot, which was a little surprising to us. We found an increase in drive circle dominance. So, you know, in. As a result of the compassion task, people were experiencing, you know, more positive, activated emotions, lack joy. So evidently they derive some benefit from the compassion task. But we didn't find any change in terms of threat or soothing. And that could just be, I guess, resultant from ceiling effects, where it's like the relief associated with no longer ruminating has resulted in, I guess, them being soothed enough and not threatened enough, that the compassion exercise itself isn't sort of giving them a whole bunch of additional benefits. I think what's more likely is they're already implementing emotion regulation strategies in the recovery period. So they're sort of not deriving a whole lot of benefit in that instance from additional emotion regulation strategies. But largely what we found there was that your three circles were responding accordingly to that experimental manipulation.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

So from rest to reactivity, threat went up, drive went down, soothing was about the same.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yes, exactly.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

From reactivity to recovery, threat went down, soothing went up, and drive stayed the same.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yep.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

And then from recovery to compassion, there wasn't much change in threat or soothing. But interestingly, drive went back up at that point.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

And one thing I wondered as I was reading the results was whether, because Paul Gilbert often says that compassion is not the same as soothing system, that compassion incorporates that sort of thing, and that sometimes compassion, well, compassion might actually involve drive system activation, the kind of the energy to go.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Exactly, exactly.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

And sort of do something in a way. And sometimes it might involve threat system and obviously just various combinations of all of them. I guess that was one thing I wondered was maybe the compassion exercise might have made a shift in something that wasn't measured. A kind of a compassionate motivation that's not really represented in one or other of those three circles.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

100%. That's what we were thinking as well. And we tried to. We try to pick a compassion task that would be sort of, I don't know, kind of simpler for that reason, so that hopefully we would see more of just like a change in soothing rather than sort of picking a compassion task where it's sort of like Think about this other person's suffering which might trigger the threat system again, right? If you're thinking about this other person undergoing something stressful or negative, you probably have a certain degree of empathy for that person and you might sort of experience some threat activation. And then also if we sort of then went from there, okay, think about what you might do to alleviate this suffering or think about alleviating the suffering again, you might experience an increase in drive. And I think that would also be the case if we did it in a behavioral experiment, right. If we gave them a potential situation where they could alleviate that person's suffering, I think we'd see even more sort of drive system activation because it's necessary to facilitate action. So I definitely think you might be onto something there.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

I mean, the really cool bit of the study too was obviously measuring the heart rate variability which you've described. So what did you find there? And when you compared maybe the three circles ratings with what was happening with people's physiology, how did they track?

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, 100%. So we found basically from. We use two different metrics of heart rate variability, by the way, that's just gold standard. I won't get into it because it's all technical and quite boring. But what we found was largely that from rest to reactivity, there was a decrease in heart rate variability, so indicative of sympathetic nervous system activation and decreased parasympathetic activation. And then from rumination to recovery, we basically found an increase in power variability. Right. So basically again reduced sympathetic activation and increased parasympathetic activation. And we found that that largely aligned with the changes that we saw in the three circles where from rest to reactivity you saw an increase in threat circle dominance and then a decrease in threat circle dominance from reactivity or recovery. So largely what that was telling us was that the three circles is reflective of changes in physiology resulting from those experimental manipulations. You know, those two metrics aligned is.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Is HRV sort of like sort of high HRV parasympathetic, low hrv sympathetic? Then is it like just the flip side or is there implications not measure like that?

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

You know, that's you're. It can be quite complicated and it's not necessarily that cut and dry, but that's largely sort of the, you know, the what the implication there, it would have been cool as well if we'd been able to measure like an actual sympathetic indicator. So like electrodermal activity, for example, or pre ejectory period. These are two measures of, you know, two explicit proxies for Sympathetic nervous system activation. But we just went for heart rate variability for this one, which is a parasympathetic indicator. But you know, because of those two systems, the two arms of your autonomic nervous system, a lot of the time kind of working like a seesaw and sort of counterbalancing each other. That was what we inferred from the findings that we obtained in terms of heart rate variability.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Okay. And there's this thing about sort of the key thing was the balance, I guess, between soothing and the other two systems that sort of mattered most, just rather than simply how much soothing was there.

[Dr. Stan Steindl]

Maybe.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Could you unpack that a bit for us?

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah. So I'm glad you asked because this brings us to the other metric of the three circles that we had tested through two papers before it. So initially we were interested in an overall imbalance variable based on sort of of that theory inherent to compassion focused therapy, where balance between the systems should facilitate emotion regulation. And so we first trialed, I guess, an imbalanced variable, which was calculated via the standard deviation across all three circles, basically how much the circles are deviating from each other. We theorize that may be indicative of imbalance between the circles, and then that imbalance may may be indicative of difficulties with emotion regulation. But basically, for the first two papers, we, I guess, delivered the three circles to young adults first and then adolescents, alongside a battery of conventional self report measures, so measures of emotion, as well as psychological distress, difficulties with emotion regulation, and self compassion. And what we found was that the imbalance variable was not predictive of those outcome variables at all. We found no significant results with the imbalance variable. And we theorized that that might be resulting from the fact that a static optimum balance between the circles might not necessarily be reflective of emotion regulation because your three systems should be responding to environmental context. And so having just a standard like flat rate balance between the circles, it isn't really compensating for your environmental stimuli. And what we found was correlated was we found the threat circle to be positively correlated with difficulties with emotion regulation and psychological distress and negatively correlated with self compassion. And we found the inverse for the soothing system. And so I guess that hinted to us, like, okay, what appears to be particularly advantageous is the ability to activate your soothing system to regulate less useful levels of threat and drive appears to sort of mitigate against psychological distress and difficulties with emotion regulation and appears to facilitate self compassion. And so from there we decided in the HRV study to trial, I guess, two log ratio metrics of, respectively, green to not green and red to not red. You know, based. Based on those findings, we were sort of like, okay, well, maybe one of those ratios might be predictive of hrv. And what we found was that the. The ratio of not green to green appeared to be negatively correlated with. Sorry, yeah, negatively correlated with heart rate variability. So basically, the more you have of not green to green, the lower your heart rate variability appears to be across the entire, entire experiment. And what appears inverse from that, what appears to facilitate heart rate variability, is that having more grain. Sorry, I was trying to put that in a way that it wasn't too jargony.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Well, it sort of makes sense. It's sort of reassuring, isn't it, for a clinician like me? Because, you know, that's what we're trying to work towards. You know, is there a way to bring that mind awareness that we mentioned early on at the start, and then to be able to do things, you know, use little strategies or other activities that helps to kind of make a shift so that it's more green to not green, I guess, as opposed to not green to green?

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Absolutely.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Okay. All right. Yeah. So Paul often talks about the three circles, not so much as three groups of emotions, obviously, but. But as. As three patterns of. Of brain and body functioning or brain states. I guess that's the thing about this study for me, is that, you know, especially with the psychophysiological work that you've been doing and, and the findings there at point really starts to, you know, kind of broaden our sense of. Of what these. These three circles might really be reflecting, you know, sort of emotions, but the psychophysiology behind that and, and perhaps motivations, as you also alluded to. But yeah, so what.

[Dr. Stan Steindl]

How. Does.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

How well does. Does sort of, you know, all that stuff about brain states fit with your own thinking or what you've. What you've come up with from this paper.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, absolutely. So I guess it kind of rubbed in the fact that those emotions aren't existing in isolation. Like, obviously that, you know, there is a link between, you know, the emotions you're experiencing and your autonomic nervous system. And I think that has sort of been, I don't know, foreshadowed for a while. Like, if you think about sort of like dialectical behavior therapy techniques where, you know, you might, I guess, like, go have a cold shower to sort of, you know, reset your autonomic nervous system to alleviate sort of really not useful levels of threat, for example, I think, you know, our study kind of lent more credence to that fact in terms of, you know, establishing, okay, there is an association between, you know, how your emotions are resulting from the experimental manipulation and how your physiology is. And you know, you can kind of, you might experience that in day to day life too in, in terms of like sometimes you don't necessarily, necessarily know whether what you're experiencing right now is anxiety, for example, or, or whether you've just got a stomachache, like maybe you ate something bad. And you know, I, I guess it sort of, yeah, just like made that fact really salient to me and, and definitely, I guess echoed what, what Paul has been saying for a while now.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

And it really speaks to the body based work that we might do as well as the imagery and the cognitive work and also that felt sense of compassionate feelings and the whole sort of model of compassionate action and the skills that we might bring to that. I suppose. I mean, what do you think all this means for the future of the Three Circles model?

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

That's a really good question. Obviously I feel like it raises more questions than it answers.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

It's a complex thing. It's complex, isn't it? And it's fun. It's good, but it is complex.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, but I think there are a lot of implications and a lot of potential different directions to take this research in. For me, I'm most interested in the practice and, and integrating, you know, this new measure that we've created into, you know, into invent intervention context as, as psychoeducation in therapeutic context. In therapeutic contexts. You know, I think that's what, what I'm really excited to see. But you know, there, there are logical future steps in terms of research as well. So you know, particular populations, they don't ne respond the same way as your standard community samples in terms of soothing system activation or stimulation or compassion tasks. So for example, young offenders that. Great work by Saussa and colleagues over at the University of Coimbra as well as Ribeiro da Silva, Diana Ribeira da Silva, I was hugely inspired by her program of research with the psychopathy.com program which was administering, you know, compassion focused therapy to young offenders in detention centers in Portugal. You know, they found reduced rates of recidivism, reduced levels of callous on emotional traits like transition from shame oriented thinking and guilt oriented thinking. And, and I was, you know, really excited by that. But in terms of, you know, Salsa and Ribera da Silva examining, you know, HRV patterns in young offenders in terms of responses to soothing stimuli, they found a lot of the time it can provoke a stress response in those populations. So I'd like to see similar work to what we've done, sort of validating the three circles in those populations in particular, as well as, I guess, in populations of, you know, participants with alexithymia. So alexithymia is like a subclinical feature of clinical disorders like autism spectrum disorder, where you don't necessarily know or you struggle to articulate the emotion you're experiencing. I think there are implications of our measure being particularly useful for those populations because they don't have to sort of try and understand exactly which discrete emotion they're experiencing. They can just rate it according to the three systems, which is kind of a simpler way of doing things, a more parsimonious way of doing things. So I'd like to see some studies conducted with those demographics in particular, to establish whether the three circles is particularly useful for those populations. But there are a whole bunch of potential avenues to take this research. I believe there's a Swiss team that are interested in. In utilizing the three circles in, you know, VR training for emotionally activating events to establish whether the sort of, like the virtual reality, you know, manipulation of emotional activation is effective. And then obviously, you know, more studies utilizing the three circles, you know, to assess emotion in other contexts as well.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

This is just the beginning in a way. What are your thoughts? This is a bit of a selfish question, I suppose, but for a therapist

[Dr. Stan Steindl]

like me, I mean, what are your

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

thoughts about combining something like the three Circles app with measures of hrv? Does it feel like that combination might have utility in a therapy setting? Or does this paper really suggest that actually we could use the. To use the app and kind of just be assured that in some ways that is reflecting too what's happening psychophysiologically?

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Yeah, 100%. So I think the purpose of this paper for us particularly was the latter. So that it's sort of like, okay, we've done it, so you don't have to, hopefully. And it's sort of like, okay, we kind of established in this paper that those patterns of heart rate variability are kind of. They coalesce with the ratings of the three circles, so you can get some inkling as to how someone's autonomic nervous system is functioning from the three circles. Obviously, the more data you have a lot of the time, the clearer picture you have. And there would be benefits to measuring HIV alongside the three circles, but it can just be sort of quite noisy the data a lot of the time. So that can just be sort of like if your electrodes aren't stuck on real good. You don't necessarily get like a great recording. You know, HRV can be quite underpowered if, you know, if you're sort of like basically running a study with multiple people, you need quite a few people to get a clear picture of what's going on in terms of the overall HRV trends. So, yeah, I think it's more the latter in this instance. But having said that, there's always benefits to taking additional measures. Right. If it's not sort of, you know, causing too many, too many issues or, you know, taking too much time.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Awesome. Well, there's a, I'll definitely be linking your papers. I think there's a couple of lead up papers that you alluded to as well. So we'll, we'll link the, link those in the description and I might actually get off you a couple of the other papers that you've found interesting. The, the Portuguese papers and, and things like that. And we'll, we'll also link the, the, the app. But yeah.

[Dr. Stan Steindl]

Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb, well done.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Congratulations on a, on a wonderful study and a great PhD graduating in just a few days, I hear. So well done on that.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

Thanks.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

And thanks for coming and speaking with

[Dr. Stan Steindl]

me on Compassion in a T shirt.

[Dr. Dylan Maloney Gibb]

No, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. It's always a pleasure. But it's been a particularly great pleasure this time.

[Interviewer (possibly a colleague or host)]

Okay, good.