Poster Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Social Anxiety, Self-Report And Implicit Perfectionism Among College Students: A Pilot Study. (#665)

Bingqian LIU 1 2 3 , Hai JING 3 , Xiujuan JIANG 3 , Xuebing LI 1 2
  1. Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
  3. JINGSHIBAIXIN Positive Psychology Research and Counseling Center, Beijing, China

Socially anxious individuals show significant social withdrawal and disability. Perfectionism has been considered by some researchers as a potential target for the intervention of social anxiety. Self-report measures were adopted in many studies to investigate the relationship between social anxiety and perfectionism. However, scales and questionnaires could reflect participants’ striving for perfection at a conscious level. It’s interesting to examine whether this maladaptive or adaptive pursuit exists at a non-conscious level, also known as implicit perfectionism, as well as the role it plays in social anxiety. In the present study, 30 college students with high social anxiety (HSA) were compared against 30 students with low social anxiety (LSA) on both explicit and implicit perfectionism measures. Self-report measures (Frost’s Multidimensional Perfection Scales) revealed that HSA and LSA significantly differed in the subscales of “Concern over Mistakes” (p<0.05), “Parental Expectations” (p<0.05) and “Doubt about Actions” (p<0.001), and not in the two other adaptive subscales. The mobile-based implicit association test (mIAT) showed significant differences between combination-block and reversed-block among all 60 individuals. No difference in implicit perfectionism was found across two groups. Besides, no correlation was found between self-report scores and IAT scores, indicating that explicit and implicit perfectionism are two independent structures.