The Research On Perfectionists' Emotional Characteristics In College Students

Perfectionism is a personality trait of setting perfect standard in work accompanying with excess criticism in self-estimate, and it has a close relation with mental health. In the early times, researchers focus on the relationship between perfectionism and dysfunctional, such as depression and obsessive compulsive disorder. Beginning from 1980s, researchers started pay attention to the adaptive side of perfectionism. Classifying and comparing college students based on perfectionism has more support for the clinical work. Based on it, 4 aims were fulfilled in the study: The College Student General Perfectionism Scale was adopted, median method was used to classify perfectionists; Use Positive and Negative Affect Scales to observe if there is a significant difference in emotion among different types of perfectionists; Use situation-oriented pride and shame questionnaire to observe if there is a significant difference in pride and shame among different types of perfectionists. Used pictures as the priming-stimuli, and took Chinese college students as subjects, then primed positive, negative and neutral emotions, to explore whether there is a significant difference in affective priming effect among different types of perfectionist. Main conclusions of the research are got as below:1. The perfectionists could be divided into adaptive perfectionists (34.81% among the whole subjects), mixed perfectionists (there was 21.52% among the whole subjects), maladaptive perfectionists (24.37% among the whole subjects) and nonperfectionists (19.30% among the whole subjects). Adaptive perfectionists have high scores on the high goals and low scores on the minding mistakes. Mixed perfectionists have high scores on the high goals and minding mistakes. Maladaptive perfectionists have low scores on the high goals and high scores on the minding mistakes. Nonperfectionists have lower scores on the high goals and minding mistakes.2. Adaptive perfectionists indicated higher positive emotions than mixed perfectionists, maladaptive perfectionists and nonperfectionists. Adaptive perfectionists indicated lower negative emotion than mixed perfectionists and maladaptive perfectionists. Nonperfectionists also indicated lower negative emotion than mixed perfectionists and maladaptive perfectionists.3. In the most of the situations, there is a significant difference in pride after success and shame after failure among four types of perfectionists. he importance of situation have a significant influence on pride and shame, control of the situation and efforts have a significant influence on shame.4. Different types of perfectionists have different characteristics in susceptibility to emotion. Mixed perfectionists have higher susceptibility to emotion than other perfectionists.