Revisiting the development of perfectionism in sport, dance, and exercise

The aim of this chapter is to revisit Flett et al.’s model of perfectionism development as it applies to sport, dance, and exercise. In doing so, we discuss the four pathways that are used to explain how perfectionism can develop - via social learning, the presence of parental expectations, the absence of parental warmth, and due to anxious rearing. In each case, we include the latest research from general psychology, and from sport, exercise, and dance domains. Readers will find that we have made some progress with regard to understanding why and how perfectionism develops. We also update our previous discussions of this topic by introducing Hewitt et al.’s concept of asynchrony. This new concept cuts across all developmental pathways and identifies insecure interpersonal attachment as the root cause of perfectionism. We close the chapter by expanding our previous discussion of coach/instructor pathways via the climates they create and describing the process by which perfectionism is internalized.