Perfectionism in children: associations with depression, anxiety, and anger
Section snippets
Participants
In total, 114 students (45 boys and 69 girls) from three schools in an urban center participated in this study. Students ranging in age from 10 to 15 [mean age of 12.30 (S.D.=1.77) years] comprised the sample. The grade level of the participants ranged between Grades 5 and 10, and 47% of the participants were in Grades 5 and 6.
Child-Adolescent Perfectionism Scale (CAPS; Flett et al., 2000)
The CAPS is a 22-item, self-report measure that assesses self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism in children with a minimum Grade 3 reading level. Items are
Results
The means and standard deviations for measures of perfectionism, depression, anxiety, anger, and stress are presented in Table 1 and zero-order correlations between the perfectionism and distress measures are below the diagonal in Table 2. Self-oriented perfectionism was positively correlated with depression and anxiety, but was not associated with the anger or stress measures. This suggests that depression and anxiety may be outcomes of perfectionism that involve requiring the self to be
Discussion
This study examined whether self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism were associated with domains of maladjustment including depression, anxiety, anger, and achievement and social stress in children. Self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism were associated with a number of forms of maladjustment. Moreover, there was evidence that self-oriented perfectionism interacted with both self-related/achievement stress and social stress to predict depression and with social stress
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (410-97-1278).
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