Maladaptive coping and self-esteem as mediators between perfectionism and psychological distress

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Abstract

This study with 508 Korean college students examined the mediation effects of maladaptive coping styles and self-esteem on the links of evaluative concerns perfectionism and psychological distress. Structural equation modeling analyses supported a full mediation effect of maladaptive coping between evaluative concerns perfectionism and distress. The final model also revealed a significant path from evaluative concerns perfectionism through maladaptive coping and self-esteem to distress. Furthermore, a multi-group analysis found that male college students with evaluative concerns perfectionism tend to use maladaptive coping strategies more compared to their female counterparts. The findings provided not only external validity for the full mediation effect of coping but also evidence of more complex relations among the variables.

Introduction

Perfectionism, defined as “the striving for flawlessness,” (Flett & Hewitt, 2002, p. 5) has been the focus of attention in psychology, especially after the advent of sound inventories to assess perfectionism from multidimensional perspectives (e.g., Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (F-MPS: Frost, Marten, Lahart, & Rosenblate, 1990); Hewitt and Flett Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale (HF-MPS: Hewitt & Flett, 1991)). With these measurement tools, empirical research on perfectionism increased drastically. There is a growing consensus that a distinction can be made between neurotic (maladaptive) versus normal (adaptive) perfectionism (Hamachek, 1978, Stoeber and Otto, 2006), yet it is maladaptive perfectionism that has been found to be associated with various forms of maladjustment (Flett & Hewitt, 2002).

Initially, empirical research on maladaptive perfectionism focused on direct links between perfectionism and indices of psychological adjustment, such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, obsessive–compulsive disorder, and suicidal ideation (see Flett and Hewitt, 2002, Shafran and Mansell, 2001). In addition to such direct associations, recently, an important line of research took it a step further to identify mediators to explain underlying mechanisms of the link between maladaptive perfectionism and distresses. Mediators refer to variables that “establish how or why one variable predicts or causes an outcome variable” (Frazier, Tix, & Barron, 2004, p. 116), providing practicing psychologists with useful information regarding intervention targets.

A review of perfectionism literature has identified two promising mediators between maladaptive perfectionism and distress: coping styles (Dunkley and Blankstein, 2000, Dunkley et al., 2000, Dunn et al., 2006) and self-esteem (Preusser et al., 1994, Rice et al., 1998). Coping styles as a mediator is based on the postulation that “individuals with perfectionistic standards who typically make use of maladaptive coping responses will be especially prone to maladjustment” (Dunkley et al., 2000, p. 440). Self-esteem is also hypothesized as an important mediator because perfectionists with extremely high standards would rarely be satisfied with their achievements and more likely to suffer from low self-esteem constantly, which would significantly exacerbate their psychological adjustment.

Previous research has identified maladaptive coping as a solid mediator between maladaptive perfectionism and distress (Dunkley and Blankstein, 2000, Dunkley et al., 2000, Dunn et al., 2006). From the studies by Dunkley and his associates, maladaptive or avoidant coping were found to fully mediate the link between evaluative concerns or self-critical perfectionism and distress. In addition, Dunn et al. (2006) showed that avoidant coping partially mediated between maladaptive perfectionism and distress in Canadian university professors. Self-esteem has also been found to play a significant mediating role between perfectionism and distress (Preusser et al., 1994, Rice et al., 1998). Preusser et al. (1994) reported that self-esteem was a significant mediator between Socially Prescribed Perfectionism from the HF-MPS and depression for men and women as well as Self-Oriented Perfectionism from the HF-MPS and depression only for women. Similarly, Rice et al. (1998) identified a significant mediating role of self-esteem between maladaptive perfectionism and depression.

Although previous research on mediating effects of maladaptive coping and self-esteem has provided insight into underlying mechanisms to elucidate the relationship between perfectionism and maladjustment, some further areas of investigation can be explored. First, testing the concurrent mediating effects of maladaptive coping styles and self-esteem, which has been examined separately, would extend our comprehensive understanding of the mechanism whereby perfectionism and maladjustment are connected. Second, the coping measures used in the previous research [Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (Endler & Parker, 1990); the COPE inventory (Carver, Scheier, & Weintraub, 1989)] have been criticized because some items are confounded with distress symptoms (Stanton, Danoff-Burg, Cameron, & Ellis, 1994). Moreover, an important aspect of coping, such as the effectiveness of coping effort (Heppner, Cook, Wright, & Johnson, 1995), was not considered. Third, only depression was utilized as a criterion variable in the studies testing the mediating role of self-esteem; examining the mediating effect with other maladjustments, such as general distress and interpersonal difficulties, would provide valuable information. Lastly, a notable limitation in the perfectionism literature is that the majority of the studies were conducted within Western countries. Researchers have consistently called for the need to investigate the construct of perfectionism and to test the generalizability of the findings to other cultures, such as Asian cultures (e.g., Castro and Rice, 2003, Preusser et al., 1994). Thus, testing the mediation models in Asian culture would provide meaningful evidence for the external validity. Taken together, the present study tested the mediation effects of both maladaptive coping styles and self-esteem between evaluative concerns perfectionism and distress in Korean college students.

Section snippets

Participants and procedure

Participants were 522 college students in two large universities in South Korea. Data from 508 students were used after data screening procedures. About half of the participants were males (n = 272, 54%), and participants’ mean age was 20.56 years (SD = 2.19). Data collection was carried out via the Internet. The instructors explained the purpose of the study as well as participants’ rights in the classes, and students who were interested in participating were informed of a World-Wide Web address

Measurement model

The analysis of the mediation effects followed the two-step procedure recommended by Anderson and Gerbing (1988). First, the measurement model was tested to assess the extent to which each of the four latent variables was represented by its indicators. Once the measurement model is accepted, testing the structural model follows. In order to control for inflated measurement errors due to multiple items for the latent variable, three item parcels were created for each of the evaluative concerns

Discussion

The current study purported to test the mediation effects of both maladaptive coping styles and self-esteem on the link between evaluative concerns perfectionism and distress with a sample of South Korean college students. The current findings corroborate that the previously reported mediating role of maladaptive coping (Dunkley and Blankstein, 2000, Dunkley et al., 2000) is robust with (a) a different cultural sample (South Korean college students), (b) different indices of maladaptive coping

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    Authors’ note. This study is based on Hyun-joo Park’s doctoral dissertation under the direction of P. Paul Heppner.

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