Perfectionism and reactions to mistakes in competitive curling

Abstract

This study investigated the role that different profiles of perfectionism can play in the emotional and cognitive responses of competitive curling athletes (199 male, 144 female; M age = 30.78 years, SD = 7.93) following failure in low- and high-criticality game situations. Perfectionism in sport was measured with the Sport-Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale-2 (Gotwals & Dunn, 2009). Negative emotional responses (i.e., anger and dejection) and positive future-oriented cognitions (i.e., optimism and self-confidence) were measured with a newly constructed Sport Emotion and Cognition Questionnaire (SECQ) that contained items from three established measures (Sport Emotion Questionnaire: Jones, Lane, Bray, Uphill, & Catlin, 2005; Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 Revised: Cox, Martens, & Russell, 2003; Life Orientation Test-Revised: Scheier & Carver, 1994). Exploratory factor analyses conducted on SECQ data produced two factors that were labelled Anger/Dejection and Optimism/Confidence. Cluster analyses conducted on Sport-MPS-2 data revealed three clusters/groups that closely resembled adaptive perfectionists, maladaptive perfectionists, and non-perfectionists from Stoeber and Otto’s (2006) tripartite model of perfectionism. A doubly-multivariate repeated-measures MANOVA revealed a significant group/cluster main effect (p < .001): post-hoc analyses indicated that adaptive perfectionists had lower Dejection/Anger responses (p < .001) and higher Optimism/Confidence responses (p < .005) following failure than maladaptive perfectionists. A significant main effect was also found for situation-criticality (p < .001): regardless of perfectionism profiles, on average, athletes had lower Dejection/Anger (p < .001) and higher Confidence/Optimism (p < .005) following failure in low- as opposed to high-criticality situations. Results support the differentiation of adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism in sport.

Acknowledgments: This research was supported by grants from the Canadian Curling Association and the Sport Science Association of Alberta.