Résumé
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.