A Study on Dysfunctional Attitudes, Social Physique Anxiety and Self-Handicapping Tendencies Among Young Adults

Abstract

Dysfunctional attitudes refers to the cognitive vulnerability to depression because in the presence of specific stressor, dysfunctional attitudes lead to broad patterns of negative, self-referent thinking. Dysfunctional attitudes are beliefs and attitudes that induce negative thoughts about the self, others, and the future, leading to depression. Social physique anxiety refers to the anxious and uncomfortable affective reaction experienced as a result of anticipating negative social evaluations of one’s own body. Thus, social physique anxiety does not merely reflect a negative cognitive self- evaluation of the body but the inability to generate favourable public impressions on the basis of one’s own physical attributes. Self-handicapping refers to any action or choice of performance setting that enhances the opportunity to externalize (or excuse) failure and to internalize (reasonable accept credit for) success. Self-handicapping behavior is likely adopted to provide an ego-protecting excuse for poor performance at achievement tasks. By creating an external attribution for poor performance, one minimizes perceived lack of ability as the cause of failure. The current research adopts a between groups design to determine whether there are any gender differences with respect to the dysfunctional attitudes, social physique anxiety and self- handicapping tendencies that individuals may have. A correlational design was used to determine associations between Dysfunctional attitudes scale (viz, functional attitudes and dysfunctional attitudes), social physique anxiety and its dimensions (viz, negative evaluation and positive evaluation) and self-handicapping scale among males and females. Non-probability convenience sampling technique was used to select a sample of 331 participants from a population of young adults. The sample consisted of 167 males and 164 females. The findings of the study revealed that women were higher in social physique anxiety and self-handicapping when compared to males. It was also revealed that there exists a correlation between Dysfunctional attitudes scale (viz, functional attitudes and dysfunctional attitudes) with social physique anxiety and its dimensions (viz, negative evaluation and positive evaluation) and self-handicapping scales amongst male and female participants.