Perfectionism and Social Anxiety: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

This meta-analysis examined the relationships between dimensions of perfectionism and social anxiety. A literature search using the databases PsychINFO, Medline, and Embase yielded 40 studies. Our findings showed large to very-large-sized associations between social anxiety and dimensions of perfectionism related to perfectionistic concerns, namely socially prescribed perfectionism, doubts about actions, concerns over mistakes, and discrepancy, as well as self-presentational perfectionism. Overall, our findings suggest that when understanding and treating social anxiety, it would be worthwhile considering the individual’s beliefs that others expect perfection, their tendency to doubt their own action, their concern over making mistakes, and beliefs about needing to present themselves perfectly. Explorative moderation analysis suggests that individual differences such as age, sex, and type of social anxiety did not moderate the relationship between perfectionism and social anxiety. Region moderated the association between perfectionistic strivings and social anxiety. Sample setting should be considered when understanding how dimensions of perfectionism relate to social anxiety. Our results shed light on the importance of perfectionism in social anxiety, which may inform the future development of interventions that target perfectionism in social anxiety.