In relation to the pathological condition
Freud's idea of narcissism described a pathology which manifests itself in the inability to love others, a lack of empathy, emptiness, boredom, and an unremitting need to search for power, while making the person unavailable to others.
Healthy narcissism has to do with a strong feeling of "own love" protecting the human being against illness. Eventually, however, the individual must love the other, "the object love to not become ill". The individual becomes ill as a result of the frustration created when he is unable to love the object. In pathological narcissism such as the narcissistic personality disorder, the person's libido has been withdrawn from objects in the world and produces megalomania. The clinical theorists Kernberg, Kohut and Theodore Millon all saw pathological narcissism as a possible outcome in response to unempathic and inconsistent early childhood interactions. They suggested that narcissists try to compensate in adult relationships. The pathological condition of narcissism is, as Freud suggested, a magnified, extreme manifestation of healthy narcissism.
Healthy narcissism has been suggested to be correlated with good psychological health. Self-esteem works as a mediator between narcissism and psychological health. Therefore, because of their elevated self-esteem, deriving from self-perceptions of competence and likability, high narcissists are relatively free of worry and gloom.
Other researchers have suggested that healthy narcissism cannot be seen as 'good' or 'bad', but that it depends on the contexts and outcomes being measured. In certain social contexts such as initiating social relationships, and with certain outcome variables, such as feeling good about oneself, healthy narcissism can be helpful. In other contexts, such as maintaining long-term relationships and with outcome variables, such as accurate self-knowledge, healthy narcissism can be unhelpful.
Commonly used measures
Narcissistic Personality Inventory
The Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) is the most widely used measure of narcissism in social psychological research. Although several versions of the NPI have been proposed in the literature, a forty-item forced-choice version (Raskin & Terry, 1988) is the one most commonly employed in current research. Another shorter version, a sixteen-item version NPI-16 (Ames, Rose & Anderson, 2013) is also present. The NPI is based on the DSM-III clinical criteria for narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), although it was designed to measure these features in the general population. Thus, the NPI is often said to measure "normal" or "subclinical" (borderline) narcissism (i.e., in people who score very high on the NPI do not necessarily meet criteria for diagnosis with NPD).
Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory
The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI) is a widely used diagnostic test developed by Theodore Millon. The MCMI includes a scale for Narcissism. The NPI and MCMI have been found to be well correlated, r (146) = 0.55, p < 0.001. Whereas the MCMI measures narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), the NPI measures narcissism as it occurs in the general population. In other words, the NPI measures "normal" narcissism; i.e., most people who score very high on the NPI do not have NPD. Indeed, the NPI does not capture any sort of narcissism taxon as would be expected if it measured NPD.
Empirical studies
Within the field of psychology, there are two main branches of research into narcissism: (1) clinical and (2) social psychology.
These two approaches differ in their view of narcissism, with the former treating it as a disorder, thus as discrete, and the latter treating it as a personality trait, thus as a continuum. These two strands of research tend loosely to stand in a divergent relation to one another, although they converge in places.
Campbell and Foster (2007) review the literature on narcissism. They argue that narcissists possess the following "basic ingredients":
· Positive: Narcissists think they are better than others.
· Inflated: Narcissists' views tend to be contrary to reality. In measures that compare self-report to objective measures, narcissists' self-views tend to be greatly exaggerated.
· Agentic: Narcissists' views tend to be most exaggerated in the agentic domain, relative to the communion domain.
· Special: Narcissists perceive themselves to be unique and special people.
· Selfish: Research upon narcissists' behavior in resource dilemmas supports the case for narcissists as being selfish.
· Oriented toward success: Narcissists are oriented towards success by being, for example, approach oriented.
Narcissists tend to demonstrate a lack of interest in warm and caring interpersonal relationships. There are several ongoing controversies within narcissism literature, namely: whether narcissism is healthy or unhealthy; a personality disorder; a discrete or continuous variable; defensive or offensive; the same across genders; the same across cultures; and changeable or unchangeable.
Campbell and Foster (2007) argue that self-regulatory strategies are of paramount importance to understanding narcissism. Self-regulation in narcissists involves such things as striving to make one's self look and feel positive, special, successful and important. It comes in both intra-psychic, such as blaming a situation rather than self for failure, and interpersonal forms, such as using a relationship to serve one’s own self. Some differences in self-regulation between narcissists and non-narcissists can be seen with Campbell, Reeder, Sedikides & Elliot (2000) who conducted a study with two experiments. In each experiment, participants took part in an achievement task, following which they were provided with false feedback; it was either bogus success or failure. The study found that both narcissists and non-narcissists self-enhanced, but non-narcissists showed more flexibility in doing so. Participants were measured on both a comparative and a non-comparative self-enhancement strategy. Both narcissists and non-narcissists employed the non-comparative strategy similarly; however, narcissists were found to be more self-serving with the comparative strategy, employing it far more than non-narcissists, suggesting a greater rigidity in their self-enhancement. When narcissists receive negative feedback that threatens the self, they self-enhance at all costs, but non-narcissists tend to have limits.
Sorokowski et al. (2015) showed that narcissism is related to the frequency of posting selfie-type pictures on social media. Sorokowski's study showed that this relationship was stronger among men than women.
Research indicates that being in devalued social group can encourage narcissism in some members of that group, as said individuals attempt to compensate for their low social status (due to being a member of a stigmatized group) by exaggerating their own self-worth by engaging in narcissism, which may also help them psychologically cope with negative treatment at the hands of others, though it may also cause them to engage in behavior detrimental to themselves.
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