A preliminary look at loneliness as a moderator of the link between perfectionism and depressive and anxious symptoms in college students: Does being lonely make perfectionistic strivings more distressing?

Perfectionists Do Not Play Nicely With Others: Expanding the Social Disconnection Model

“…Historically, researchers were required to make a choice between testing moderation models and testing mediation models. It was also never really clear why a researcher might consider a variable (e.g., interpersonal problems) as a moderator in one study (e.g., Chang, Sanna, Chang, & Bodem, 2008) and a mediator in another study (e.g., Sherry et al, 2008). By focusing on interpersonal problems as a mediating variable (e.g., Mackinnon et al, 2012), and largely ignoring interpersonal problems as a moderating variable, the original SDM shares this limitation.…”

Anxiety and Perfectionism: Relationships, Mechanisms, and Conditions

“…In this study, moderational analyses were conducted to see whether self-oriented, other-oriented, and socially prescribed perfectionism predicted anxiety at high and low levels of loneliness. Although the selforiented and other-oriented dimensions of perfectionism are not consistently related to negative outcomes in the broader literature and thus are often not investigated in studies predicting psychopathology (See Anxiety and Perfectionism above), Chang et al (2008) found that other-oriented perfectionism as well as socially prescribed perfectionism maintained relationships with trait anxiety, with loneliness acting as a significant moderator. In comparison with individuals low in these dimensions of perfectionism, participants with elevated scores for other-oriented or socially prescribed perfectionism experienced disproportionate increases in anxiety symptoms when they felt alone.…”

Social and psychological predictors of onset of anxiety disorders: results from a large prospective cohort study

“…It has for example been found that not having a partner [7,11] living alone [12], low quality of social network [13], low control or imbalance at work [3,14], loneliness [15,16], and a low sense of coherence [17][18][19] all are factors that are associated with anxiety disorders. However, since the majority of these studies are cross-sectional, the causal interpretation of the findings has been ambiguous.…”