著者

坪田 祐基 石井 秀宗 野口 裕之 TSUBOTA Yuki ISHII Hidetoki NOGUCHI Hiroyuki

出版者

名古屋大学大学院教育発達科学研究科

雑誌

名古屋大学大学院教育発達科学研究科紀要. 心理発達科学 (ISSN:13461729)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.63, pp.47-56, 2016

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Perfectionism is the striving for flawlessness, and extreme perfectionists are people who want to be perfect in all aspects of their lives. It is known that perfectionism is related to a number of psychological and physiological problems, such as apathy, neurosis, alcoholism and anorexia nervosa. A number of studies have investigated the relationship between perfectionism and maladaptation. Recent studies have suggested that perfectionists have certain cognitive biases, including selective attention to failure, which is particularly problematic. The few previous investigations of this problem based on the social cognitive paradigm had the shortcomings that the used task was limited to the emotional Stroop task, and used stimulus words were only negative perfectionism-related words (failure-related words). In order to overcome these problems, relationships between perfectionism and selective attentions to success- or failure-related words were investigated with the dot-probe task. The result indicated moderate correlations between perfectionism and selective attention to both success- and failure- related words in males, whereas little correlation was found in females. However, success- and failurerelated words used in that study were associated with the task situation (e.g., "correct", "achieving," "mistake," and "error"), which are familiar to male, but not to female perfectionists. Therefore, it is still unclear if the above result was caused by the fact that female perfectionists did not pay attention to successes and failures, or that the words used were not familiar to females. In order to resolve this issue, this study employed the dot-probe task and words related to social situations and investigated relationships between perfectionism and selective attentions. Undergraduates (N = 100, 50 female and 50 male) were asked to perform the dot-probe task and complete self-report questionnaires. In the dotprobe task, participants first focused on a central fixation cross that was shown on a computer screen. It was replaced by two stimuli after 500ms, which were displayed one above the other. For example, the screen displayed a word related to success in social situations and a neutral word. These words disappeared after 500 ms, and a symbol appeared on the screen replacing one or the other word. Participants should respond to the shape of this symbol as fast as possible. If a participant had tendency to pay more attention to such words related to social situations, reaction time to the words would be shorter when the symbol replaced a word related to social situations compared to when it replaced a neutral word. Three kinds of stimuli were used. The first group was words related to successful social situations such as "compromise" and "closeness". The second group was words related to failures in social situations such as "isolation" and "friction". The third group was neutral words such as "pencil" and "weather. Self-reporting questionnaires were also administered: Self-Oriented Perfectionism (SOP) items in the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (MPS), the Multidimensional Self-oriented Perfectionism Scale (MSPS), and the Multidimensional Perfectionism Cognition Inventory (MPCI). Ratio of reaction time in neutral condition (neutral words vs. neutral words) to that in conditions including social situations related words (e.g., social situation failure- vs. neutral words) was computed as an index of selective attention. Pearson's product-moment correlation coefficients between this index and perfectionism scale scores showed almost no significant correlations in both males and females. These results suggest that perfectionists do not pay attention to success- or failure words in social situations. Sex differences in relationships between perfectionism and maladaptation in social situations would be caused by other factors such as behavior and consciousness.