Personality
Do different kinds of narcissists react differently to rejection?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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
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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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