The moderating role of cognitive emotion regulation strategies in relation between spiritual/religious perfectionism with mental health indices and depression/anxiety symptoms

A great majority of research has extensively identified that maladaptive perfectionism is highly related to more negative emotions, anxiety, hostility and shame. In comparison to this kind of maladaptive perfectionism, religious/spiritual perfectionism is a new term which has recently been introduced as an adaptive type of perfectionism but its effects on mental health indices and depression/anxiety symptoms have only been explored in few studies.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the moderating role of cognitive emotion regulation strategies in the relationship between spiritual/religious perfectionism with mental health indices and depression/anxiety symptoms.

A total of 510 individuals (381 men, 126 women) participated in the study. Participants were asked to complete an onlie questionnaire including the Mental Health Invetory-28 (Veit & Ware, 1983), Depression/Anxiety/Stress Scale (Lovibond & Lovibond, 1995), (Spiritual/Religious Perfectionism Scale-14 (Besharat, 2019), and Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Garnefski & Kraaij, 2006; Garnefski, Kraaij, & Spinhoven, 2001). Pearson Correlation Coefficient and Hierarchical Linear Regression were used to analyze the data.

Result showed that spiritual/religious perfectionism had a significant positive association with mental well-being and a significant negative association with mental distress and depression/anxiety symptoms (p<0.01). Result also revealed that although the relationship between spiritual/religious perfectionism with mental health indices and depression was not moderated by cognitive emotion regulation strategies, the relation between this kind of perfectionism and anxiety was moderated by maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies (p<0.01).

Spiritual/religious perfectionism is an adaptive dimension of perfectionism and people who experience higher degrees of this type of perfectionism do not experience negative emotions, anxiety, and depression when they experience failure to achieve spiritual and religious perfection. Now, if some of these people use maladaptive emotion regulation strategies to regulate their unpleasant emotions, their anxiety will increase.