Fear of Failure

They were also more effective communicators, consistent with what listeners actually understood. Low scorers overestimated their effectiveness.

Two errors in opposite directions, and only one group is wrong about the performance. The high scorers are wrong about themselves and right about the room. Winton, Clark and Edelmann added the corroborating result in 1995: people scoring higher on the scale are more accurate at identifying negative expressions.

How fear of negative evaluation is measured

David Watson and Ronald Friend defined fear of negative evaluation in 1969 as three things at once:

• apprehension about others' evaluations
• distress over negative evaluations
• the expectation that others will evaluate one negatively They built the test in the same work: thirty items, about ten minutes, scored from zero to thirty.

Mark Leary produced the brief version in 1983, twelve of the original questions on a five-point scale, scored from twelve to sixty. Both have high internal consistency and the two correlate very closely.

The validity result is the interesting one. Fear of negative evaluation does not correlate strongly with other measures of social apprehension, including the SAD PERSONS scale and the Interaction Anxiousness Scale, which means it is measuring something those instruments miss.

Where it becomes a diagnosis

Fear of failure is not classified as a phobia. It appears across anxiety disorders, mood disorders and eating disorders, and it also exists in people with no diagnosis at all.

One claim in the material is stronger than the rest and deserves quoting precisely: fear of negative evaluation is a direct cause of eating disorders arising from social anxiety, and it ranks higher than depression and social comparison among their causes, being the foundation for bulimic attitudes and body dissatisfaction.

Twin studies find a genetic component in brief-scale scores, and those scores are genetically correlated with a personality pathology instrument, which suggests the genes influencing evaluation fears affect a range of anxiety-related behaviours.

How self-handicapping makes the fear true

The 2015 reference describes the mechanism that makes this fear self-fulfilling. A person afraid of failing an exam they have studied for may not take the exam, which produces the exact outcome they dreaded and strengthens the original fear.

The reasoning behind it is protective and is stated plainly: failing through not trying is easier on self-esteem than failing after real effort. It is the misreading of one's own standing that Impostor Syndrome runs on. Self-handicapping preserves the explanation at the cost of the result.

The severity runs on a continuum. Most people have felt mild versions of this about something new or challenging and worked through them. At the severe end the fear is disproportionate to reality, and the example given is a person afraid of doing badly on an exam despite having studied and having passed similar exams before.

What happens under pressure

Low scorers on the scale withstood higher levels of pressure in basketball and maintained their performance. High scorers showed a significant decrease under pressure.

Set that beside the public speaking result and the picture is specific rather than general. The fear does not impair performance across the board; it impairs performance when pressure is applied, and in unpressured conditions it may improve it by making a person attend to how they are being received.

What the Greek atyches actually says

Atyches means unfortunate, and atychiphobia is therefore a fear of being unfortunate rather than of failing, which is a looser word than the construct it names. The 2008 printed encyclopedia defines fear of failure in three words and cross-references itself.

Fear of failure is described as closely linked to perfectionism, which is common across all the disorders it appears in.