Am I (Not) Perfect? Fear of Failure Mediates the Link Between Vulnerable Narcissism and Perfectionism

(1) Background: Perfectionism, generally conceptualized as a striving for flawlessness, can lead to maladaptive thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Both grandiose narcissism (GN) and vulnerable narcissism (VN) represent relevant personality dispositions for perfectionism. There is reason to assume that GN and VN predispose to different forms of perfectionist cognition and behavior. It remains unclear, however, whether GN and VN are indeed distinctly associated with different aspects of perfectionism and-if so-why. (2) Methods: We explored relationships between GN, VN, other-oriented, and socially prescribed perfectionism in a convenience sample of 210 adults (59% female) and further examined whether these relationships were mediated by distinct aspects of fear of failure, which has been identified as a critical driver for perfectionism. Moreover, we assessed implicit failure avoidance by means of response latencies obtained in a lexical approach-avoidance task. (3) Results: Our results indicate that perfectionist styles discriminate GN from VN whereby GN predict other-oriented and VN predict socially prescribed perfectionism. The latter relationship was largely mediated by social aspects of fear of failure (e.g., the fear of important others losing interest). In contrast, fear of failure did not explain the link between GN and other-oriented perfectionism. Furthermore, only VN was exclusively related to faster implicit failure avoidance. (4) Conclusions: This pattern of results suggests distinct mechanisms for GN and VN in the context of perfectionism. Our study provides support for the theoretical separation of GN and VN as relatively distinct phenotypes of narcissism and adds to clinical research linking GN and VN with different types of psychopathology.