What Is Perfectionism Effective?

Perfectionism can be understood as a personality trait characterized by an interaction between setting high standards of performance and excessive self-criticism or concerns to reaching them (Blankstein & Dunkley, 2002; Stoeber & Otto, 2006). Several authors have claimed that perfectionism could be adaptive or maladaptive depending on how individual interpret their performance (Hamachek, 1978; Suddarth & Slaney, 2001; Rice & Slaney, 2002). Thus, if a person has a severe self-criticism, possibly consider that there is a wide discrepancy between their ideal and actual performance, bringing him or her to experience psychological distress. By contrast, those subjects who have a flexible evaluation of its achievements, tend to be considered adaptive.

To this end, instruments adapted to our culture and with solid psychometric properties were selected (Arana, Keegan, & Rutsztein, 2009; Heredia, Piemontesi, Furlan, & Hodapp,

Alden, Ryder and Mellings (2002), for instance, argue the existence of four quadrants of perfectionism associated with social phobia. One of these quadrants is represented by subjects that are not considered perfectionists in the traditional sense but have an overly critical self-evaluation of its performance. Additionally, this form of self-evaluation was proposed as, a maintaining factor in social phobia (Heimberg & Becker, 2002). Rice, Ashby and Gilman (2011), moreover, indicated that perhaps this group should not be considered perfectionist since subjects do not describe themselves as having standards of excellence. However, several studies have reported that this subtype should be taken into account (Boone, Soenens, Braet, & Goossens, 2010; Wang et al., 2007). Sironic and Reeve (2012) found that these individuals refuse to have high standards when asked by questionnaires but often feel frustrated when, paradoxically, they cannot meet their high standards. Following this line, if there are differences between the purely self-critical among other subtypes (maladaptive, adaptive, and non-perfectionist), therapeutic work with these patients should be adapted. Indeed, this particular self-critical group possibly gain less benefit with current approaches to treatment of perfectionism (Egan et al., 2014;.