Relationships between Shame-Coping, Fear of Failure, and Perfectionism in College Athletes

Headnote

Relationships among shame-coping, perfectionism, and fear of failure were examinined in a sample of college athletes. Shame and related negative emotions are commonly experienced among athletes after performance failures. According to Nathanson (1992), individuals may maladaptively respond to shame-provoking situations through one of four coping styles. We hypothesized that the magnitudes of the correlations between shame-coping styles versus perfectionism and fear of failure would be ordered by the degree to which the coping-styles involve consciousness and internalization of shame: Attack Self, Withdrawal, Attack Other, and Avoidance. College athletes (N=285) completed the Compass of Shame Scale-Sport, the Performance Failure Appraisal Inventory, and the Perfectionism Inventory. Correlations among the variables indicated that differences in one's proneness to the four shame-coping styles significantly predict individual differences in tendencies toward fear of failure and perfectionism and supported the hypothesized order. Results revealed differences in shame-coping based on sport type and sex. Thus, Nathanson's compass of shame model may have important implications for athletes who suffer from maladaptive forms of perfectionism and fear of failure.

Shame is one of many emotions that can result from an athletic performance. The public nature of sport and the salience of competitive outcomes can cause strong emotional reactions for athletes. Although many of these emotions, such as joy and pride, are positive, many are not, such as anger and shame. In the emotion literature, shame and its variants (e.g., embarrassment, humiliation) are typically conceptualized as a basic emotion family whose antecedent is the perceived experience of being seen by others as something "less than" how we would like to be seen (i.e., devaluation; Elison, 2005 ; Partridge & Elison, 2009). The social experience of shame is central to its occurrence. Thus, it is critical that research should explore the relationships among shame and other socially based constructs in sport. To date, limited research in sport contexts has identified the issue of shame as an emotional response to participation (Crossman, Gluck, & Jamieson, 1995; Lewthwaite & Scanlan, 1989; Ruiz & Hanin, 2004), therefore shame as a precipitating factor in behavioral outcomes in sport has yet to be fully explored (Partridge & Elison, 2009).

Shame-coping

From an evolutionary perspective, humans are social beings that rely on the benefits provided by living in groups; thus, social...