General health and personality characteristics: the criteria to determine compatibility and incompatibility of the perfectionism’s type

Perfectionism is a personality characteristic that is defined in various forms but in most of these definitions, willingness to complete and superiority are common. Segmentation of perfectionism to two kinds: positive or negative, adaptive or maladaptive and healthy or unhealthy and or to various kinds, began by Hamachek (1978) and so far, several theorists have attempted to verification, completion or modify the types mentioned by him. The newest division is 2*2 model of perfectionism by Gaudreau & Thompson (2010) that has divided perfectionism into four types. The main aim of the present study was to evaluate the compatibility of various components of perfectionism based on the general health components and personality characteristics. In this study causal-comparative as a descriptive method was used. 198 MA students of Allameh Tabatabaee University selected by cluster random sampling method and divided into four groups based on perfectionism’s types. Then, these four groups were compared using multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) in terms of personality characteristics and components of general health that respectively were measured with NEO personality inventory and GHQ-28.Given that the criteria for determining the compatibility and incompatibility types of perfectionism in this research were general health component and characteristics of personality’s scores, especially nervousness, the findings are as follows: a) Mixed perfectionism is the most maladaptive type of perfectionism; b) self-evaluative perfectionism is more maladaptive than conscientious perfectionism and non-perfectionism; c) conscientious perfectionism is more adaptive than all types of perfectionism. According to the results, we can say that self-evaluative perfectionism is maladaptive anyway and even conscientious perfectionism not only can’t neutralize its negative effects but makes it negative effects, more. The reason for this result is probably that conscientious perfectionism of who have both perfectionisms (mixed perfectionism) is extremist and inflexible