Title

Shedding Light On The Relationship Between Personal Standards And Psychopathology: The Case For Contingent Self-Worth

Keywords

Perfectionism; Personal standards; Psychopathology; Self-worth

Abstract

Previous research has revealed some puzzling inconsistencies in the relationship of Personal Standards (PS) to measures of psychopathology. This study was designed to explore the hypothesis that setting high Personal Standards will relate to psychopathology only when meeting these standards is a necessary condition for a sense of self-worth. We generated items that reflected a sense of conditional self-worth based on the meeting of Personal Standards and named this measure the Contingent Self-Worth Scale (CSWS). Factor analysis of the CSWS and the PS subscale of the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale yielded three types of Personal Standards: "Pure Personal Standards," "Success-Based Self-Worth," and "Activity-Based Self-Worth." Two of the original PS items did not load on the Pure Personal Standards scale. Correlational analyses revealed that Pure Personal Standards was related to measures of adaptive outcome whereas both measures of Contingent Self-Worth were related to more maladaptive functioning, although with some small differences. We call for further research to explore the relationship of PS to the construct of perfectionism. © 2004 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

Publication Date

12-1-2004

Publication Title

Journal of Rational - Emotive and Cognitive - Behavior Therapy

Volume

22

Issue

4

Number of Pages

241-254

Document Type

Review

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JORE.0000047310.94044.ac

Socpus ID

26844473322 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/26844473322

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