Research on perfectionism factors it into two terms: - Perfectionistic stridings (PS) which is aspects of perfectionism characterised by high personal standards and striving for perfection - Perfectionistic concerns (PC) which is aspects of perfectionism relating to “concern over mistakes, fear of negative evaluations, feelings of discrepency between ones standards and performance and negative reactions to imperfection” which are mal/adaptive in different ways. This paper seeks to elucidate their combined effect.
Only PC is consistently associated with ‘maladaptive outcomes’, and PS often shows association with adaptive (ie, good) outcomes. So perfectionism can be good and bad, and can be thought about in terms of these two components. In which case, what’s the combined affect of PS and PC? Is that adaptive or maladaptive, or both?
The researchers are looking at this because they are sports psychologists investigating burnout. Previous research has found that ps is negatively associated with academic and career burnout (ie, ps means less burning out) whereas pc is positively associated (ie, causes more burning out :(). How do we investigate this combined effect?
Let’s combine the scores we have for PS and PC and see how this score correlates with adaptive and maladaptive outcomes. Someone already did this (how did they combine them??) a study which did this found no overall effect. Firstly, the measures aren’t commesurate. and also you might find total perfectionism unrelated to an outcome even though it is strongly related to both PC and PS.
or we can use a 2x2 model of perfectionism, so we have low/high of each of ps/pc making for 4 combinations overall. in this model, in the mixed perfectionism box, ps and pc are combined in such a way that gives them equal weight whilst controlling for their overlap meaning comparing this measure with non-perfectionism gives an unbiased estimate of the combined effects.
basically they found that pc and ps did sometimes cancel each other out and that this could be distinguished in empirical findings!! cool! and that the varience in pc and ps still explained the overall variance in perfectionism even when they cancelled each other out.
a lot of this paper is statistics and stuff i don’t really care about at the minute, it’s cool, but not very insightful. i didn’t know perfectionism could be so effectively factored into ps and pc, and that ps was associated with adaptive outcomes. i guess i shouldn’t be so afraid of striving for excellence (well, see below, it’s still associated with burnout), but be happy to ignore what other people think/compare myself (pc). i guess that meshes with my experience as it is… but it’s fun to read a paper supporting it.
Hence the ultimate answer to our question [what is the combined effect of PC and PS on burnout] is: Whereas PS has shown consistent adaptive effects on burnout, perfectio- nism—understood as the combination of PS and PC—has an overall maladaptive effect on burnout.
however, this approach (ie, this method of using the 2x2 model used by the current authors) does not work in cases where there is strong PS x PC interaction. PSxPC interactions don’t often appear in the literature, so maybe they aren’t important, or maybe they just aren’t reported. any work pruporting to show such an interaction hasn’t been replicated and is scarce to begin with.
okay, but what if there are more than two dimensions? well the present work can be easily extended. there are 3 dimensional models with self-oriented, other-orientd and socially prescribed perfectionisms which can have varying mal/adaptive effects in lots of directions.
okay, but isn’t this going back to a 1D concept of perfectionism? no, the approach here preserves the multi-dimensional aspect and the separation of pc and ps is crucial to the present formulation of the combined effect. not combining into a single perfectionism, but combined effects.
perfectionism is a well known double-edged sword. in general, the adaptive effects of perfectionistic stridings tended to be smaller than the maladaptive effects of perfectionistic concerns. so overall it’s probably maladaptive. ah well.
tldr: it’s both! it can be both!