A randomised controlled trial of group cognitive behavioural therapy for perfectionism
Section snippets
Participants
Participants self-referred in response to advertisements distributed to universities, GPs, psychologists, psychiatrists and workplaces throughout Perth, Australia. Participants were required to have elevated perfectionism, defined by a score greater than 24.7 on the Concern over Mistakes (CM) subscale of the Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (FMPS; Frost et al., 1990). This is the average CM score derived from previous research examining perfectionism in anxiety disorder samples
Participant flow and sample characteristics
There were 154 individuals who expressed interest; 43 were eligible and 42 were randomised, as seen in the CONSORT diagram in Fig. 1 (Moher et al., 2010). As reported in Table 2, the intervention and control groups did not significantly differ on any outcome measure at baseline.
Treatment effects on perfectionism
As seen in Table 3, there were significant Group × Time interactions for perfectionism (CM, PS, DA, CPQ, DAS-SC, distress and interference) at the Bonferroni-corrected α-level of .007. Effect sizes for the interactions
Discussion
This study provides evidence that group CBT-P effectively reduces perfectionism and this effect is maintained at 6-month follow-up. This RCT found that CBT-P reduces Concern over Mistakes, Personal Standards, Doubts about Actions and Dysfunctional Attitude Scale-Self Criticism (DAS-SC) scores in addition to Clinical Perfectionism Questionnaire (CPQ) scores to a significantly greater extent than a control group. While Riley et al. (2007) found significant Group × Time interaction effects for the
Acknowledgements
The individuals who contributed to this manuscript all met the criteria for authorship. All authors acknowledge the School of Psychology and Speech Pathology at Curtin University, Perth, Australia who provided the funding for the data collection materials.
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