Document Type
Research Paper
Date of Completion
2024
Department
Behavioral Sciences
Faculty Mentor
Jeremiah Sullins
Abstract
Undergraduate education is challenging for most students, bridging the path from teenager to young adult while continuing their education. All students will take difficult courses that could affect their mentality. Student mentality is operationally defined using three concepts: perfectionism, shame proneness, and imposter phenomenon. Perfectionism is the striving towards unrealistic and impossible to reach standards. Shame is a negative emotion students can feel when they deem themselves flawed or deficient instead of identifying specific actions as flawed. Imposter phenomenon occurs when someone who, although successful, believes himself or herself to be a fraud who will inevitably fail. Investigation into how the course demands of an undergraduate major affect student mentality can inform us about our undergraduate education system. A non-probability convenience sampling survey was sent to students to determine if pre-health science students differ from other students in perfectionism, shame proneness, or imposter phenomenon. This study reports no statistically significant difference among students' scores when sorted by major. Our findings do, however, show correlations between self-oriented perfectionism, shame proneness, and imposter phenomenon. This supports the reinforcing cycle among our variables found in previous literature.
Copyright held by
author
Recommended Citation
Gootee, A. (2024). Perfectionism, Shame, and Imposter Phenomenon in Health Science Students and Other Students. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.harding.edu/mcnair-research/32
