Due to increased empirical interest in narcissism across the social sciences, there is a need for inventories that can be administered quickly while also reliably measuring both the agentic and antagonistic aspects of grandiose narcissism. In this study, we sought to validate the factor structure, provide representative descriptive data and reliability estimates, assess the reliability across t...

This paper attempts to reconcile two perspectives on the impact of positive trait change. The first perspective views positive trait change as salubrious because it reflects the process of self-enhancement, whereas the second perspective views positive change as costly because it disrupts the self-verification process. We propose that benefits and costs accrue at discrete rates, such that moder...

When their sense of personal control is threatened people try to restore perceived control through the social self. We propose that it is the perceived agency of ingroups that provides the self with a sense of control. In three experiments, we for the first time tested the hypothesis that threat to personal control increases the attractiveness of being part or joining those groups that are perc...

Neuroscientific studies on agency focus rather exclusively on the notion of who initiates and regulates actions, not on the notion of why the person does. The present study focused on the latter to investigate two different reasons underlying personal agency. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, we scanned 16 healthy human subjects while they imagined the enactment of voli...

The significance and effectiveness of pre-reading activities in the contexts of both ESL and EFL has been acknowledged by many researchers. If students lack the required background knowledge, a teacher must activate students’ background knowledge or offer background information prior to reading a text. The present study aimed at investigating the role of pre-reading questions plus extensive rea...

This research sought to examine the mediating role of psychological capital in the relationship between authentic leadership and work engagement among school principals and teachers. The study had a descriptive, correlational design. The statistical population of the study was comprised of all school principals and teachers in Aleshtar (located in Lorestan Province) in school year 2016-17 from ...

This study investigated the extent that cooperative group members’ levels of hopefulness, operationalized as a combination of pathways to meet desired goals and the agentic thinking that motivates an individual to use those pathways, predict (a) group performance, namely, the quality of an article critique assignment and research proposal assignment, and (b) the degree that heterogeneity (i.e.,...

Agency problems in economics virtually always entail self-interested agency exhibiting “insufficient” loyalty to principal. Social psychology also has a literature, mainly derived from work by Stanley Milgram, on issues of agency, but this emphasizes excessive loyalty – people undergoing a so-called “agentic shift” and forsaking rationality for loyalty to a legitimate principal, as when “loyal”...

Self-interest and moral sensibilities generally compete with one another, but for moral exemplars, this tension appears to not be in play. This study advances the reconciliation model, which explains this anomaly within a developmental framework by positing that the relationship between the self's interests and moral concerns ideally transforms from one of mutual competition to one of synergy. ...