THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COMPETIVE PERFECTIONISM AND SPORT MENTAL TOUGHNESS IN ELITE MARTIAL ARTS

Mental toughness is one of the most important psychological characteristics that have large impact on athlete’s success. One of the most important issues is to understand factors that affect it; it seems that paying attention to determined standards is one of the ways to develop this characteristic. Thus, the purpose of present study was to investigate the relationship between competive perfectionism and mental toughness in elite martial arts. Present research method was correlational. Statistic population was included all of martial arts that were in the national team camps and 132 athletes selected based on random sampling, and completed the Scals of mental toughness sheard et al (2009) and perfectionism Stoeber et al (2007). The data was analyzed by Pearson correlation, multiple regressions and anova. Pearson correlation showed a significant relationship between perfectionism and mental toughness. Regression analysis showed that positive and negative perfectionism dimensions predict 34 percent of mental toughness variance altogether. Also results of Anova test showed that men relative to femail had significantly higher mental toughness and more positive perfectionism (P≤ 0.01). Generally, results showed that perfectionism dimensions can be a useful procedure for martial arts talent identification and also to founding mental toughness educational programs for them. The results of Pearson correlation showed that there is a significant positive and negative correlation between the that positive and negative perfectionism and mental toughness (p