No abstract

We examined how perfectionistic people conceptualize perfectionism and narrate life events using thematic analysis. Participants included 20 university students who qualified as highly perfectionistic based on cutoffs on the Almost Perfect Scale-Revised (n = 6 adaptive, n = 14 maladaptive). Participants completed a qualitative interview. Using thematic analysis, we identified five themes regarding participants' conceptualization of perfectionism. The most common themes supported prior theory (high personal standards, performance is never good enough), along with a few comparatively understudied themes (being neat and orderly, feels superior to others, gets caught up in the details). We also identified five themes in a life narrative interview (relationship success, relationship problems, agentic redemption, agentic contamination, and academic success), which provided insight into how young, perfectionistic university students create meaning and identity through autobiographical narratives. "Relationship success" themes were most central to adaptive perfectionists, whereas "agentic redemption" themes were most central to maladaptive perfectionists.

Gamblers’ cognitive distortions are thought to be an important mechanism involved in the development and maintenance of problem gambling. The Gambling Cognitions Inventory (GCI) evaluates two categories of distortions: beliefs that one is lucky (i.e., “Luck/Chance”) and beliefs that one has special gambling-related skills (i.e., “Skill/Attitude”). Prior psychometric evaluations of the GCI demonstrated the utility of both subscales as measures of distortions and their concurrent relations to gambling problems among Canadian gamblers. However, these associations have not yet been studied in gamblers from other cultures nor have relationships between the GCI and indices of gambling behavior been investigated. In addition, the predictive validity of the GCI scales have not been evaluated in studies to date. The present study investigated the validity of the GCI as a measure of cognitive distortions in a sample of 49 Dutch gamblers by examining its concurrent and prospective relationships to both gambling problems (as measured through a standardized nine-item questionnaire assessing gambling-related problems) and behaviors (as measured through two variables: days spent gambling and time spent gambling in minutes) at baseline and over 1-month and 6-month intervals. The GCI subscales were internally consistent at all timepoints, and moderately to strongly inter-correlated at all timepoints. Each subscale correlated with an independent dimension of gambling both concurrently and prospectively: Luck/Chance was related to greater gambling problems and Skill/Attitude was related to greater gambling behavior. Thus, the two GCI subscales, while inter-correlated, appear to be related to different gambling outcomes, at least among Dutch gamblers. Moreover, the first evidence of the predictive validity of the GCI scales was demonstrated over a 1-month and 6-month interval. It is recommended that both types of cognitive distortions be considered in research and clinical practice to fully understand and address individual risk for excessive and problematic gambling.

In the Netherlands, relative to non-problem gamblers, moderate- to high-risk gamblers appear to have a stronger tendency to approach rather than to avoid gambling-related pictures compared with neutral ones. This gambling approach bias is associated concurrently with past-month gambling expenditure and duration of gambling and has been found to predict persistence in gambling behaviour over time.

Further investigation will be needed to determine whether naltrexone is efficacious among depressed alcohol dependent patients and whether naltrexone and antidepressant medications show interactive efficacy for treating alcohol dependence.