The Effect Of Perfectionism On Social Anxiety:the Mediating Role And Intervention Of Self-compassion

Social anxiety is an unnecessary anxiety emotion generated by individuals in real or imagined social situations,which is bestowed on them by themselves.Personality traits are an important factor that affects the generation of individual social anxiety.Generally,individuals with perfectionist personality traits exhibit high standards and intolerance of their own mistakes,which leads to social anxiety in social situations due to concerns about their self-expression and the evaluation of others.At the same time,perfectionist individuals do not compassion with themselves when they make mistakes,but instead engage in self-criticism and self-devaluation and demand that they continue to pursue perfection.In addition,low self-compassion can significantly predict individual social anxiety.Therefore,this research chose university students as the study population to explore the factors influencing social anxiety.Furthermore,mindfulness training was used to intervene in the self-compassion of college students with perfectionist personality to improve their social anxiety.In Study 1,a questionnaire was used to examine the relationship between perfectionism,self-compassion,and social anxiety,as well as the mediating role of self-compassion.The Communicative Anxiety Scale,the Common Perfectionism Scale for College Students and the Chinese version of the Self-Compassion Scale were used to survey 348 college students from two universities.SPSS software was used to conduct descriptive statistics,correlational analysis and process-mediated analysis on the data findings.The following results were obtained from study 1.Perfectionism is positively correlated with social anxiety.Self-compassion is significantly negatively correlated with perfectionism and negatively correlated with social anxiety.Self-compassion plays a partial mediating role in perfectionism and social anxiety.In Study 2,a total of 35 university students who met the eligibility criteria and volunteered to participate in the experiment selected in Study 1(18 in the intervention group and 17 in the control group)were tested using the experimental method.The intervention of mindfulness training was conducted for a total of two weeks to explore whether mindfulness training can improve college students’ level of self-compassion and thereby reduce their social anxiety.With self-compassion and social anxiety as dependent variables,a mixed experimental design of 2(mindfulness intervention group,blank control group)×3(pre-test,post-test,two-week post-test)was adopted,in which group was the inter-group variable and test time was the intra-group variable,to explore the intervention effect of mindfulness training.The results showed that:(1)In the analyses of self-compassion,firstly,there were no significant differences between the pre-test marks of the two groups to clarify the homogeneity of the subjects;scores on the pre-test,post-test and two-week post-test of the intervention group were significantly different,indicating the presence of an intervention effect.There were no significant differences between the scores of the control group on the pre-test,post-test and two-week post-test,while the intervention group’s scores were significantly greater than those of the control group immediately after the treatment.Two weeks after the interference,the scores of the intervention group were significantly better than those of the pre-test and control groups,although there was a slight drop.(2)An analysis of social anxiety was performed.Firstly,there were no significant differences between the pre-test scores of the two groups to make clear the subject’s homogeneity;there were significant differences between the pre-test,post-test and two-week post-test scores of the intervention group,indicating the existence of an intervention impact;there were no significant differences between the pre-test,post-test and two-week post-test scores of the control group;after the intervention,the scores of the intervention group were significantly below those of the control group.Two weeks after the intervention,the scores of the intervention group were significantly worse than those of the pre-test and control groups,although there was a slight increase.To sum up,the following main conclusions have been drawn in the current study.Self-compassion plays a partial mediating role between perfectionism and social anxiety.Mindfulness training improves self-compassion among college students with perfectionist personality,and both short-term and long-term effects are significant.Mindfulness training improves the social anxiety of college students with perfectionist personality,and both short-term and long-term effects are significant.