Do different kinds of narcissists react differently to rejection?
People high in vulnerable narcissism felt more negative after being socially excluded, whereas people high in grandiose narcissism instead lost positive feelings without reporting more negative ones.
Source
Pathological Narcissism and Emotional Responses to Rejection: The Impact of Adult Attachment
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Within-subject Cyberball task (fair-inclusion baseline round then an exclusion round, fixed order) with affect measured after each, plus trait questionnaires analysed with hierarchical regression
- N
- N=269 · 269 community and university participants (204 women, 65 men), all completing both Cyberball rounds
- Population
- Australian community adults and university students recruited via social media and a university research site, mostly young adults
- Outcome
- Trait positive and negative emotional reactivity, and change in positive and negative affect from the inclusion round to the rejection round
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
269 adults completed brief questionnaires on grandiose and vulnerable narcissism, psychological entitlement, four adult attachment styles and trait emotional reactivity. They then played Cyberball, an online ball-tossing game with computer players they believed were real people: first a fair round in which they got the ball equally often, then a rejection round in which they got it only once. Mood was rated after each round, and regression models tested which traits predicted mood and change in mood.
What they found
The rejection round worked: on average positive mood fell and negative mood rose. Vulnerable narcissism was linked to fearful and preoccupied attachment, to stronger negative trait reactivity (swamping the effect of attachment once added), and to a larger rise in negative mood after rejection. Grandiose narcissism was linked to more positive trait reactivity and, after rejection, to a larger drop in positive mood rather than a rise in negative mood; it was also unexpectedly linked to preoccupied attachment. Entitlement predicted more negative mood in both rounds but not a change between them.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The narcissism and attachment measures were correlational traits, so the study cannot say narcissism causes the emotional reactions, as the authors note. The fixed order (fair round always first) means the mood change mixes rejection with time-on-task or fatigue, and there was no inclusion-only control group. Emotions were measured with short self-report scales, which may miss distress that grandiose people do not admit or recognise, and the models predicting mood change explained only a small share of the variance. The sample was mostly young, female, non-clinical students and community members rather than people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.
Key terms
- Grandiose narcissism
- A form of narcissism marked by an inflated self-image, entitlement, arrogance and a drive to dominate or be admired.
- Vulnerable narcissism
- A form of narcissism marked by fragile self-esteem, hypersensitivity to criticism, shame and a tendency to hide the self while still craving recognition.
- Cyberball
- A computer ball-tossing game in which programmed players stop passing to the participant, used to create a brief experience of social exclusion in the lab.
- Adult attachment styles
- Four patterns (secure, preoccupied, fearful, dismissive) defined by whether a person holds positive or negative mental models of themselves and of others.
- Hierarchical regression
- A regression in which predictors are added in steps to see how much extra variance a new set of variables explains beyond those already entered.
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Quiz yourself
Which pattern best describes vulnerable narcissism in this study?
Common questions
Does this mean grandiose narcissists do not feel hurt by rejection?
Not necessarily. They reported less positive mood rather than more negative mood, and the authors suggest they may feel distress but fail to recognise or report it, as some brain-imaging work has hinted.
Why did adding narcissism make attachment styles non-significant for negative reactivity?
Vulnerable narcissism overlapped heavily with fearful and preoccupied attachment and was the stronger predictor, so once it was in the model the attachment styles no longer explained unique variance.
Is this an experiment or a correlational study?
Both in part: rejection was manipulated within each person, but the key predictors (narcissism and attachment) were measured traits, so their links to emotion are correlational.
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