Multidimensional perfectionism and attentional bias: implications in everyday life settings

Abstract

Perfectionism is generally being understood as a multi-facet personality construct and associated with several negative outcomes. One of them is attentional bias, the tendency for individual to selectively attend to a type of information while ignoring the others. Although this relationship has been replicated in several studies by Stroop task, it was unclear that whether this relationship could be generalized to everyday life. Current study attempted to examine this relationship by using dot probe task, a test designed specifically for studying this cognitive bias. In order to understand whether selective attention occurred when individual was processing events in daily life, hypothetical scenarios were used as stimuli. Results revealed that the relationship between perfectionism and attentional bias existed when individuals encountered everyday life scenarios. Besides, a surprising finding was that different dimensions of perfectionism also showed attentional bias to dimension-unrelated scenarios, suggesting possible common features among dimensions. Detailed discussion of the topic was presented below.