Perfectionism in High School Students, Academic Emotions, Real and Perceived Academic Achievement

Abstract

Being studied initially in the field of psychopathology, the perfectionism was considered as a personality style characterized by negative aspects like striving to be perfect, self-criticism and also low self-esteem and depression. But the last decade’s research drew up perfectionism as a multidimensional construct which imply personal and social elements, with both positive and negative effects onto performance and development. So, the multidimensional model belonging to Hewitt and Flett (1991) distinguish between self-oriented perfectionism; other-oriented perfectionism, and socially prescribed perfectionism. In the educational field, the perfectionism was studied in relation to academic performance and motivation, to achievement goals and to some negative emotions like anxiety, shame, and guilt. But there are just a small number of studies that analyzed the perfectionism in relation to positive emotions in educational settings. Pekrun, Goetz, Titz, and Perry (2002) indicated that students are experiencing a rich diversity of emotions in different academic contexts. In this study, we explored the self-oriented and the socially-prescribed perfectionism, in relation to positive and negative test-related emotions, within a group of 187 high school students. Results indicated that, when controlling for academic achievement, hope and pride, but also anxiety, anger and guilt are significantly associated with self-oriented perfectionism and uncorrelated with socially-prescribed perfectionism. Instead, the socially-prescribed perfectionism was correlated but the self-oriented perfectionism was not correlated with hopelessness.