Mediator and moderator roles of mistake rumination, mindful awareness and emotion regulation difficulties in the association of maladaptive perfectionism and social anxiety

Social anxiety disorder is a highly prevalent and debilitating condition, and various cognitive processes, as well as maladaptive perfectionistic tendencies have been associated with the onset and maintenance of social anxiety symptoms. The present study aimed to investigate how mistake rumination; a specific form of post-event rumination is contributing to social anxiety through a two-staged moderated mediation model. Additionally, mindful awareness and emotion regulation difficulties were proposed as potential moderators in the mediation model. Three-hundred and twenty-two participants (229 females, mean age = 35.30, SD= 12.68) from a community sample completed measures of perfectionism, mindful awareness, mistake rumination, difficulties in emotion regulation, and social anxiety on an online survey platform. The data were analyzed through bias-corrected bootstrapping analyses. Mistake rumination demonstrated positive associations with maladaptive perfectionism, emotion regulation difficulties, and social anxiety, while being negatively associated with mindful awareness. Mediation analyses revealed that mistake rumination, while partially mediating the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and the anxiety dimension of social anxiety measure, was not a significant mediator of the maladaptive perfectionism and the avoidance dimension of social anxiety. Neither of the proposed moderators were significantly interacting with the model. However, post-hoc analyses revealed that emotion regulation difficulties, while partially mediating the relationship between mistake rumination and the fear dimension; completely mediated the relationship between mistake rumination and the avoidance dimension of social anxiety. This is the first study to examine how mistake rumination is contributing to subjective experiences of social anxiety, while further supporting the transdiagnostic aspect of maladaptive perfectionism in social anxiety disorder.