University of Alicante, Spain

Perfectionism and school anxiety in compulsory education

The academic world is one of the most prevalent domains of perfectionism and it implies, among other aspects, the need to reach excessively high performance standards without experiencing satisfaction even when excellent grades are achieved. Perfectionist students tend to be highly self-critical and to believe that the people that are important to them, such as their parents or teachers, expect them to be perfect in everything they do, which causes extreme concern and fear of mistakes, as well as, of disappointing loved ones. This group of irrational beliefs that characterise perfectionism consist of psychological vulnerability factors and can entail very severe psychopathologies. In this sense, research has established the existence of a positive relation between anxiety and perfectionism during infancy and adolescence. However, after reviewing the existing literature, studies carried out in the specific field of school anxiety were not found. Nevertheless, school anxiety is a research topic of great interest, not only because epidemiological studies establish high prevalence rates, but also due to the consequences that it entails in all areas of a child´s development. Therefore, the aim of the present symposium is to explain the relation between perfectionism and specific anxiety in the presence of school situations, as well as, how to analyse its influence on academic development throughout compulsory education, studying the way in which these variables are associated with various constructs of psychological and educational interest.

José Manuel García Fernández is a University Professor. Currently he carries out his teaching and research work at the Developmental and Didactics Psychology Department at the Alicante University. He has published more than seventy articles, half of them with an international impact (JCR) in scientific Psychology and Education journals, as well as more than a hundred and fifty studies presented at national and international congresses. His main lines of research are assessment and treatment in anxiety and school rejection and its relation with cognitive-motivational variables, and the analysis of the explanatory variables in school performance.