Perfectionism in Gifted College Students: Family Influences and Implications for Achievement.

Through a qualitative interview study, the researcher investigated how different dimensions of perfectionism--socially prescribed and self-oriented--developed within gifted college students and influenced their achievement motivation and their attributions for successes and failures. Findings indicated that gifted students scoring high on either the measure of socially prescribed or self-oriented perfectionism attributed the development of this tendency in part to a lack of experience with failure in their early school years. The socially prescribed participants also believed their perfectionism developed due to pressure they experienced from their perfectionistic parents. For this group, the themes included fearing failure, setting performance goals, and practicing maladaptive achievement behaviors in addition to themes of minimizing successes, overgeneralizing failures, and making internal attributions for failures. In contrast, gifted students scoring high on the measure of self-oriented perfectionism attributed their perfectionism to social learning due to their parents' modeling of perfectionistic behaviors. Themes included a desire for self-improvement, setting both mastery and performance goals, and practicing adaptive achievement behaviors as well as tendencies to make healthy attributions for successes and failures, and frustration with coping with failures. Recommendations for parents and teachers working with gifted. perfectionistic students are provided, and implications for future research on perfectionism are highlighted.

Kristie L. Speirs Neumeister (2002), University of Georgia 

Kristie L. Speirs Neumeister, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at Ball State University where she teaches undergraduate courses in educational psychology and graduate courses in gifted education. Her research interests include gifted women and the psychosocial development of gifted individuals.

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