Clinical Perfectionism

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Pages: 5

It has previously been demonstrated that the perfectionism is linked to negative affect (Hamachek, 1978; Hollender, 1965; Patch, 1984) and a variety forms of psychopathology including eating disorder, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (Burns & Beck, 1978; Patch, 1984; Flett & Hewitt, 2002). Studies on the clinical perfectionism suggest that clinical perfectionism is significantly related to a variety of psychopathology(Bruch, 1976; Vitousek & Manke, 1994). In those studies, researchers found that most participants with eating disorders, particularly anorexia nervosa, have perfectionistic traits and these perfectionistic traits play as maintaining factors in eating disorders (Slade, 1982). Other forms of perfectionists also have eating …show more content…
Hewitt and Flett (1993) carried out a study to examine the association between the two forms of perfectionism and negative affect. The results told that both forms of perfectionism show significant relationships with negative affect such as anxiety, angry and depression. Interestingly, socially prescribed perfectionism is more significantly and largely related to negative emotions and this finding has been observed across studies (Hewitt et al., 2002; Frost, Heimberg, Holt, Mattia, & Neubauer, 1993). Self-oriented perfectionism also shows significant associations with psychological maladjustment. However, it constantly correlates positively only with anxiety and the associations with depression and anger were not significant than the correlations with anxiety (Hewitt & Flett, 1991; Frost et al, 1993; Dunkley & Blankstein, 2000). The results indicated that people with socially prescribed perfectionism are more prone to feel anger, anxiety and depression than self-oriented perfectionists. These results are consistent with Lo and Abbott (2013) who concluded that socially prescribed perfectionists are less resilient and are more maladjusted in comparison with self-oriented …show more content…
First, the present study focused on three forms of perfectionism-socially prescribed perfectionism, self-oriented perfectionism and clinical perfectionism. Previous studies have examined the effect of failure on either three dimensions of perfectionism or two dimensions of perfectionism-socially prescribed perfectionism and self-oriented perfectionism because Hewitt and Flett (1993) suggested that other-oriented perfectionism was not a vulnerable factor than other two forms of perfectionism and other researchers expected that other-oriented perfectionism would not predict reactions to failure (Stober et al., 2014). In line with the previous studies, in the current study, other-oriented perfectionism was not regarded whereas clinical perfectionism was considered because previous studies indicate that clinical perfectionism is significantly associated with negative affect, psychopathology and