The Interaction Between Perfectionism and Rumination Predicting State Self-compassion

Recent research has revealed self-compassion to be associated with many aspects of mental wellness. The present study investigates the relationship between perfectionism and rumination in predicting state self-compassion separately for both conscientious and self-evaluative forms of perfectionism. We hypothesized that perfectionism would interact with rumination in predicting state self-compassion such that there would be a negative association between occurrence of rumination and state-self compassion that would be more prominent in those with lower levels of perfectionism in regards to self-evaluative, but not conscientious perfectionism. To test these predictions, participants filled out a perfectionism inventory and completed a four minute ruminative (or non-ruminative) writing task before completing a sate self-compassion questionnaire. Although we found no significant interaction between self-evaluative perfectionism and rumination, our results reveal self-evaluative perfectionism to be inversely related to state self-compassion such that people with lower levels of self-evaluative perfectionism generally experienced greater momentary states of self-compassion