To examine the reactivity of narcissists to achievement and social events in their daily lives, 161 participants completed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (Raskin & Hall, 1979) and daily diary measures of state self-esteem and daily experiences (i.e., positive achievement events, negative achievement events, positive social events, and negative social events). Multilevel random coefficient models found that narcissists reported greater decreases in their state self-esteem on days with more negative achievement events than was observed for non-narcissists. Narcissism did not moderate the associations observed for state self-esteem and the other daily events. These results suggest that narcissists may be especially reactive to mundane achievement failure experiences. The discussion will focus on the asymmetry in the reactivity of narcissists to daily events.
Narcissism has been a popular construct in psychology since its introduction by Ellis (1898). Narcissism – as a personality disorder – is characterized by features such as grandiosity, the need for attention and admiration, a sense of entitlement, lack of empathy, extreme emotional reactivity, and fragile self-esteem (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). The interest of social-personality psychologists in narcissism has greatly intensified in recent years as there has been a general shift toward treating sub-clinical levels of narcissism as a continuum much like any other personality trait (see Miller & Campbell, 2008 for a comparison of clinical and social-personality conceptualizations of narcissism).2 Narcissism is particularly interesting as a personality variable because it functions as a “bridge” to other facets of the self (e.g., Campbell, Brunell, & Finkel, 2006). For example, researchers have been interested in examining how narcissism manifests in areas such as self-regulatory strategies and interpersonal relationships.
The dynamic self-regulatory model of narcissism (Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001) proposes that the very core of narcissism is a self-concept that is grandiose yet vulnerable. The vulnerable nature of the narcissistic self-concept is believed to be what drives these individuals to seek feedback from the social environment that affirms their tenuous feelings of self-worth. This model also suggests that many of the attributes that characterize narcissists are the result of their attempts to regulate their self-esteem through both intrapersonal mechanisms (e.g., nurturing grandiose fantasies about themselves) and interpersonal processes (e.g., boasting to others about their accomplishments). Unfortunately for narcissists, many of the strategies they employ to regulate their self-esteem are thought to be unsuccessful because of their tendency to alienate others due to their self-absorption and insensitive behavior. Not surprisingly, these interpersonal problems often prevent narcissists from receiving the praise and admiration from others that they crave so desperately.
1.1. Narcissism and fragile high self-esteem
The reliance of narcissists on external sources to bolster their feelings of self-worth may help to explain why narcissism has been shown to have a complex and inconsistent association with fragile forms of self-esteem (see Bosson et al. (2008) or Zeigler-Hill and Myers (2008) for reviews). In contrast to secure high self-esteem which is characterized by well-anchored, positive attitudes about the self that are resistant to threat, fragile high self-esteem is characterized by positive attitudes about the self that require external validation and are vulnerable to challenge (Kernis, 2003). Our understanding of fragile self-esteem is still in its earliest stages, but the research that has been conducted to this point suggests that fragile high self-esteem is associated with maladaptive behaviors such as self-deception, defensiveness, aggression, and self-handicapping (see Kernis (2003) for a review). There are three commonly used markers of fragile high self-esteem: discrepancies between implicit and explicit self-esteem (Bosson et al., 2003 and Jordan et al., 2003), contingent self-esteem (Crocker and Wolfe, 2001 and Deci and Ryan, 1995), and self-esteem instability (Kernis, Grannemann, & Barclay, 1989). Although these markers are distinct, previous research has found associations between these markers which is consistent with the idea that they are indicators of the same underlying construct (e.g., Kernis et al., 2008 and Zeigler-Hill, 2006).
The present results found that the state self-esteem of narcissists was more closely associated with negative achievement events than the state self-esteem of non-narcissists. This is consistent with the idea that these sorts of events are particularly aversive for narcissists because these experiences undermine their grandiose – but vulnerable – self-views (e.g., Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001). In contrast, narcissism did not moderate the association between state self-esteem and the other daily events that were examined. The strong association observed between the state self-esteem of narcissists and negative achievement events suggests that the feelings of self-worth of narcissists are highly sensitive to even these mundane sorts of everyday failures.
