A possible link between perfectionism and navigational strategies: Implications for late adolescence

The studies in this thesis aimed to investigate the possible link between perfectionism and navigational strategies in late adolescence from a developmental psychopathology perspective. Literature suggests that assessing navigational strategies is an efficient way to observe the involvement of multiple memory systems in the etiology of variety of psychopathologies. However, there has not been any study investigating perfectionism, which is a risky personality trait for developing psychopathologies, from this perspective. Accordingly, an experimental design involving a computer-based virtual maze paradigm was established to observe navigational strategies and the efficiency for the usage of these strategies. Forty-eight late adolescents and 32 young adults participated in the study. After the experiment, their perfectionism scores were assessed by using the Turkish adaptation of Frost Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale. The regression analyses indicated a possible link between participants' scores on some of the perfectionism subscales/dimensions and their navigational performances. This link was largely group dependent with the navigational performance of different groups showing different sensitivities to perfectionism subscale scores. When Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) was trained according to these data, participants' maladaptive perfectionism scores could be predicted with great ease by behavioral data during training trials in the virtual maze. Related clinical implications, limitations and future directions for research were discussed.