| Summary: | Research has argued that perfectionism, as well mood state, can serve to influence the
type and amount of information that will be attended to and remembered in one’s surrounding
environment. The purpose of the current study was to look at how mood and differing degrees of
threat may influence the cognitive processes of individuals higher in perfectionism. Following
completion of the perfectionism measures, 121 post-secondary students were exposed to a mood
induction as well as a threat condition and then asked to complete three cognitive tasks – d2 test
of attention, emotional Stroop, and a recognition task. Results indicated that perfectionism was
associated with accuracy and reaction time and this impact differed based on mood and threat.
Results also indicated individuals higher in perfectionism had a memory bias towards negative
and perfectionistic content, reinforcing the idea that perfectionism has a distinctly cognitive
component that impacts how an individual processes incoming information.
|
|---|
