Narcissism is typically viewed as a dimensional construct in social psychology. Direct evidence supporting this position is lacking, however, and recent research suggests that clinical measures of narcissism exhibit categorical properties. It is therefore unclear whether social psychological researchers should conceptualize narcissism as a category or continuum. To help remedy this, the latent ...

Three types of adult narcissism, as assessed with Wink’s (1991) observational rating method, were studied over a period of 25 years, with participants from the Intergenerational Studies of the Institute of Human Development, UC Berkeley. Narcissism was assessed on three occasions, from age 34 to age 59. Hypersensitive narcissism was found to decrease, Autonomous narcissism increased, and Willfu...

Narcissism levels have been increasing among Western youth, and contribute to societal problems such as aggression and violence. The origins of narcissism, however, are not well understood. Here, we report, to our knowledge, the first prospective longitudinal evidence on the origins of narcissism in children. We compared two perspectives: social learning theory (positing that narcissism is cult...

Understanding the developmental roots of narcissism has inspired much theorizing but little systematic inquiry. In this light, the longitudinal study by Brummelman et al. (1), which found that early socialization experiences in the form of parental overvaluation predicts the development of childhood narcissism, is a notable contribution to the empirical literature. Establishing a link between c...

Recent research and theorizing suggest that narcissism may predict both positive and negative leadership behaviors. We tested this hypothesis with data on the 42 U.S. presidents up to and including George W. Bush, using (a) expert-derived narcissism estimates, (b) independent historical surveys of presidential performance, and (c) largely or entirely objective indicators of presidential perform...

It has been suggested that there are two forms of narcissism: a grandiose subtype and a vulnerable subtype. Although these forms of narcissism share certain similarities, it is believed that these subtypes may differ in the domains upon which their self-esteem is based. To explore this possibility, the present study examined the associations between these narcissistic subtypes and domain-specif...

There is a lack of consensus surrounding the conceptualization of narcissism. The present study compared two measures of narcissism-one used in clinical settings (Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire, PDQ-4+; Hyler, 1994) and one used in social-personality research (Narcissistic Personality Inventory, NPI; Raskin & Terry, 1988)-across two samples. Sample 1 (N=271) was composed of undergraduates...

This prospective study examined relations between preschool personality attributes and narcissism during adolescence and emerging adulthood. We created five a priori preschool scales anticipated to foretell future narcissism. Independent assessors evaluated the participants’ personality at ages 14, 18, and 23. Based upon these evaluations, we generated observer-based narcissism scales for each ...

The present study examined the associations between pathological forms of narcissism and responses to scenarios describing private or public negative events. This was accomplished using a randomized twowave experimental design with 600 community participants. The grandiose form of pathological narcissism was associated with increased negative affect and less forgiveness for public offenses, whe...

We examined whether self-esteem and narcissism predict the occurrence of stressful life events (i.e., selection) and whether stressful life events predict change in self-esteem and narcissism (i.e., socialization). The analyses were based on longitudinal data from two studies, including samples of 328 young adults (Study 1) and 371 adults (Study 2). The effects of self-esteem and narcissism wer...