Impulsive buying makes billions of dollars for retail businesses every year, particularly in an era of thriving e-commerce. Narcissism, characterized by impulsivity and materialism, may serve as a potential antecedent to impulsive buying. To test this hypothesis, two studies examined the relationship between narcissism and impulsive buying. In Study 1, we surveyed an online sample and found tha...

The current study examined the relationship between narcissism and vanity, and the degree these are predicted by the ‘Big Five’ personality traits and mating effort (ME) using a sample of 103 females recruited from a large beauty salon. Narcissism correlated with vanity at 0.72 (P < 0.001), and was associated positively with extraversion (E), ME and the subscales of vanity; narcissism was assoc...

In recent years, there has been increasing acknowledgment of the multidimensionality of narcissism and that different types of narcissism may relate differently to other domains of functioning. Similarly, aggression-a frequently discussed correlate of narcissism-is a heterogeneous construct. In this study, the relations of proactive and reactive aggression with overt and covert manifestations o...

Narcissism can be seen along a continuum of adjustment with well-defended narcissism on the adjusted end, and poorly-defended narcissism on the maladjusted end. Poorly-defended narcissism is associated with negative emotions, and somatic preoccupations. The present study investigated whether aspects of poorly-defended narcissism can be changed during hospital treatment and if the change predict...

Narcissism is a multifaceted construct that is inconsistently defined and assessed between clinical psychology and social-personality psychology. The purpose of the present study was to examine the similarities and differences in the cognitive schemas underlying various forms of narcissism. This was accomplished by examining the associations of normal and pathological forms of narcissism with t...

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...