The Relationship Between Perfectionism and Stress Generation: the Moderating Role of Looming Cognitive Style

Abstract

The stress generation hypothesis suggests that certain maladaptive personality traits significantly contribute to the generation of negative life events (NLEs) in people’s lives through inherent maladaptive mechanisms. Previous research indicated that the impact of stress generating risk factors might be augmented or weakened by other transdiagnostic risk factors such as the looming cognitive style (LCS) which includes physical and social looming that have been found to predict different domains of life stressors. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine the moderating roles of the dimensions of the LCS separately, in the relationship between perfectionism (i.e., socially prescribed perfectionism) and stress generation in a group of emerging adults. One-hundred and ninety nine (134 females) undergraduate students aged 18–25 (M = 20.23, SD = 1.56) completed an online questionnaire that measured their level of perfectionism, LCS, and NLEs twice over a six-week interval. The results showed that only social looming significantly moderated the relationship between socially prescribed perfectionism (SPP) and interpersonal NLEs at time 2. These findings show the augmenting impact of social looming on the stress generating effect of elevated SPP, highlighting the importance of examining co-occuring vulnerabilities rather than single risk factors in the stress generation process. © The Author(s) 2025.