Defense Mechanisms and Psychological Distress in Perfectionists

Many individuals are concerned with meeting high standards for performance. In recent time there has been extensive support for a two dimensional structure of perfectionism emphasizing maladaptive and adaptive aspects of the construct. Therefore present study attempts to explore defense mechanism utilized by different types of perfectionists and non-perfectionists and to compare psychological distress among the different group of perfectionists and non-perfectionists. Sample comprised of 100 female college students in the age range of 21-24 years. The scales utilized for the study were The Almost Perfect Scale Revised (Ashby & Trippi et al., 2001), Defense Style Questionnaire-40 (Andrews et al., 1993), Hopkins Symptom Checklist-21 (Green et al., 1988). The data obtained was analyzed by using analysis of variance. Results revealed that maladaptive perfectionists tend to employ immature defenses whereas adaptive perfectionist reported highest usage of mature defense mechanism. In addition, results show that maladaptive perfectionist reported highest psychological distress followed by non perfectionist, and least by perfectionist adaptive group.