Socially prescribed perfectionism and graduate student burnout: Dual pathways via impostor feelings and generative AI anxiety, and via academic procrastination.

Graduate students increasingly navigate sustained performance pressure alongside rapidly evolving norms around generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Drawing on stress and resource perspectives, this study examined whether socially prescribed perfectionism relates to academic burnout through two hypothesized pathways: an identity-threat route involving impostor feelings and GenAI anxiety, and a maladaptive coping route involving academic procrastination, while testing GenAI use frequency as a moderator. An anonymous cross-sectional survey of Chinese graduate students yielded N=812 valid cases. Participants completed measures of socially prescribed perfectionism, impostor feelings, GenAI anxiety, academic procrastination, and burnout. Confirmatory factor analysis supported a five-factor measurement structure with good reliability and validity, and structural equation modeling with bootstrapped confidence intervals tested the hypothesized indirect associations. Socially prescribed perfectionism was associated with higher impostor feelings and procrastination; impostor feelings were linked to greater GenAI anxiety; and both GenAI anxiety and procrastination were positively related to burnout, with a larger statistical indirect association through procrastination. Multi-group analyses indicated metric invariance and showed that the impostor→GenAI anxiety association was stronger among higher-frequency GenAI users, whereas the procrastination→burnout association was stronger among lower-frequency users. These findings identify two distinct patterns of association linking perceived external evaluative demands with graduate burnout and indicate that the association between impostor feelings and GenAI anxiety differs by GenAI use frequency.