Identifying the social antecedents of para athletes striving for perfection

INTRODUCTION AND REVIEW OF LITERATURE Perfectionism is surging at relatively higher rates among youth due to tougher competitive conditions. Young people of recent generations are experiencing excessive burden to strive against one another to deal with the rapid transformations in every sphere of life. Due to this excessive strain, today's youth set extreme and unrealistic standards of performance for them that result into psychological ill-health. A metaanalysis of 284 studies has shown the significant relationship between higher level of perfectionism and psychopathology (Limburg et al., 2016). Perfectionism is undoubtedly ingrained in different domains of individual's life including education, work, clinical settings and other evaluative domains. Sport competitions, by their very nature, are highly evaluative and competitive platforms in which sportspersons are supposed to give their perfect performance. Sportspersons expect or are expected by others to perform at peak levels specifically in higher level competitions. They try hard to do their best to record a personal best score or time, win a medal, break a record, be selected for a team, or even just experience the joy of winning. In order to achieve an optimum level of perfectionism in sports, sportspersons adopt unique and specific kind of behaviours and thought patterns. These cognitive and behavioural patterns bring the performance of sportspersons to another level depending upon the nature of patterns. Some individuals use adaptive behaviours and thought patterns whereas others prefer maladaptive ways of behaving and thinking to attain the goal of perfectionism. Attaining perfectionism in specific domain is one of most important goals of all human beings. All human beings strive towards perfectionism as this striving for perfection is innate in nature. Striving for perfection is innate in the sense that it is an urge which is indispensable part of life and without which life would be next to impossible (Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1956). This is equally true for gifted population which implies that gifted individuals have equal tendency as normal individuals to reach the pinnacle of perfectionism. Individual differences lie in the ways individuals utilise to strive for perfectionism. Some individuals attempt in a functional way whereas others,