(Press-News.org) COLUMBUS, Ohio - A comprehensive analysis of 437 studies from around the world provides the best evidence to date that narcissism is an important risk factor for both aggression and violence, researchers said.
The link between narcissism and aggression was found for all dimensions of narcissism and for a variety of types of aggression. Results were similar regardless of gender, age, whether they were college students, or country of residence.
And, to have an impact, narcissism doesn't have to be at levels so high as to be pathological. Findings showed that even when narcissism was within what is considered a normal range, higher levels were linked to aggression.
"It is a pretty straightforward message: Narcissism is a significant risk factor for aggressive and violent behavior across the board," said Brad Bushman, co-author of the study and professor of communication at The Ohio State University.
The study was led by Sophie Kjaervik, a graduate student in communication at Ohio State. It was published yesterday (May 24, 2021) in the journal Psychological Bulletin.
"The link we found between narcissism and aggression was significant - it was not trivial in size," Kjaervik said. "The findings have important real-world implications."
The researchers combined and analyzed data from many studies to provide a comprehensive view of this research area. In this meta-analysis, they examined data from 437 independent studies with a total of 123,043 participants.
Narcissism is characterized by an overblown sense of self-importance, Bushman said. The key component of narcissism is entitlement. Narcissism also has two peripheral components: grandiose (those with high self-esteem) and vulnerable (those with low self-esteem). The study found all of these components were linked to aggression.
Narcissism was related to all forms of aggression measured in the studies the researchers analyzed, including physical, verbal, bullying, direct or indirect, and displaced onto innocent targets.
"Individuals who are high in narcissism are not particularly picky when it comes to how they attack others," Kjaervik said.
Findings showed that narcissism was linked to online cyberbullying, as well as bullying offline.
"That's a highly important finding now that we live in an online world," she said.
People higher in narcissism were not only more likely to lash out in anger, but were also more likely to be "cold, deliberate and proactive" in their aggression, Bushman said.
People high in narcissism were more likely than others to be aggressive whether they were provoked or not, the study found. But the risk for aggression was significantly higher when they felt provoked, such as being ignored or insulted.
The researchers were somewhat surprised to find that the link between narcissism and violence was nearly as strong as its link with less serious forms of aggression. Violence is more rare than and is generally more difficult to predict than lesser forms of aggression, Bushman said. In this study, violence was defined as aggression intended to cause physical harm such as injury or death.
But these results are consistent with research suggesting that narcissism might be a risk factor for extremely violent acts such as mass shootings, he said.
One argument could be that the narcissism-aggression link would be more likely to occur in individualistic countries, like the United States, where people emphasize their personal rights. But the analysis found that narcissism and aggression were related even in more collectivist countries.
And findings were similar whether the research participants were college students or a more general population.
It might be tempting to think these results apply only to people who are "narcissists," but that would be wrong, Bushman said.
For one, you can't separate people into those who are narcissists and those who are not. Nearly everyone has some degree of narcissism, even though only a minority have levels high enough to be called pathological.
Findings in this study suggest that higher levels of narcissism are related to more aggression even before it reaches pathological levels.
"All of us are prone to being more aggressive when we are more narcissistic," Bushman said.
One thing that clearly stood out in the analysis, he said, was how people high in narcissism respond when they feel threatened.
"Our results suggest provocation is a key moderator of the link between narcissism and aggression," Bushman said.
"Those who are high in narcissism have thin skins, and they will lash out if they feel ignored or disrespected."
INFORMATION:
Contact: Brad Bushman, Bushman.20@osu.edu
Sophie Kjærvik, Kjaervik.1@osu.edu
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, 614-292-8457; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu
Two articles published online today by Alzheimer's & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions, a journal of the Alzheimer's Association, show substantial changes in the focus and funding of clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease therapies. The newly published articles throw a greater spotlight on a decision -- now before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) -- that would potentially bring a new drug therapy to Alzheimer's patients for the first time in nearly 20 years.
Researchers analyzed clinicaltrials.gov, the U.S. National Library of Medicine's database, and five years of annual Alzheimer's pipeline reviews published by UNLV School of Integrated Health Sciences research professor Jeffrey L. Cummings ...
Researchers at the Vienna BioCenter designed a testing protocol for SARS-CoV-2 that can process tens of thousands of samples in less than 48 hours. The method, called SARSeq, is published in the journal Nature Communications and could be adapted to many more pathogens.
The COVID-19 pandemic has lasted more than a year and continues to impact our lives tremendously. Although some countries have launched speedy vaccination campaigns, many still await large-scale immunization schemes and effective antiviral therapies - before that happens, the world urgently needs to regain a semblance ...
While we sleep, the brain produces particular activation patterns. When two of these patterns - slow oscillations and sleep spindles - gear into each other, previous experiences are reactivated. The stronger the reactivation, the clearer will be our recall of past events, a new study reveals.
Scientists have long known that slow oscillations (SOs) and sleep spindles - sudden half-second to two-second bursts of oscillatory brain activity - play an important role in the formation and retention of new memories.
But experts in the UK and Germany have discovered that the precise combination of SOs and sleep spindles is vital for opening windows during which ...
As devices continue to be built on an increasingly small scale, scientists are looking toward developing ways to engineer materials at the atomic level. In a breakthrough that will contribute to this, published in Nature Communications, researchers from the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research and RIKEN Center for Advanced Photonics, along with collaborators, have developed a way to use a "dry transfer technique"--a technique that uses no solvent--to position optical quality carbon nanotubes in a precise way.
Carbon nanotubes are a promising type of materials with potential uses in applications such as light-emitting diodes, ...
HOUSTON - (May 25, 2021) - Sometimes things are a little out of whack, and it turns out to be exactly what you need.
That was the case when orthoferrite crystals turned up at a Rice University laboratory slightly misaligned. Those crystals inadvertently became the basis of a discovery that should resonate with researchers studying spintronics-based quantum technology.
Rice physicist Junichiro Kono, alumnus Takuma Makihara and their collaborators found an orthoferrite material, in this case yttrium iron oxide, placed in a high magnetic field showed uniquely tunable, ultrastrong interactions between magnons in the crystal.
Orthoferrites ...
PULLMAN, Wash. - Before the huge potential of tiny nanocarriers for highly targeted drug delivery and environmental clean-up can be realized, scientists first need to be able to see them.
Currently researchers have to rely on attaching fluorescent dyes or heavy metals to label parts of organic nanocarrier structures for investigation, often changing them in the process. A new technique using chemically-sensitive "soft" X-rays offers a simpler, non-disruptive way of gaining insight into this nano-world.
In a study published by Nature Communications, a research team demonstrates the capability of the X-ray method on a smart drug delivery nanoparticle and a polysoap nanostructure intended to capture crude oil spilled in the ocean.
"We have developed a ...
Ancient Judeans commonly ate non-kosher fish surrounding the time that such food was prohibited in the Bible, suggests a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Tel Aviv.
This finding sheds new light on the origin of Old Testament dietary laws that are still observed by many Jews today. Among these rules is a ban on eating any species of fish which lacks scales or fins.
The study reports an analysis of ancient fish bones from 30 archaeological sites in Israel and Sinai which date to the more than 2,000-year span from the Late Bronze Age (1550-1130 ...
Emergency department visits for common conditions such as appendicitis, miscarriage, gallbladder attacks and ectopic pregnancy decreased markedly at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but patient outcomes were not worse, found research published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.202821.
"These findings are reassuring, as patients who required emergency care in the first wave of the pandemic continued to present to the emergency department, received similar care and had similar outcomes to patients presenting in the prepandemic period," writes Dr. David Gomez, a trauma surgeon at St. Michael's Hospital, Unity ...
Summary: A new study published by the open access publisher Frontiers shows the usefulness of opportunistically collected specimens, such as stranded carcasses, to study elusive species. The researchers used stable isotope analysis of skin, muscle, and bone tissue of Sowerby's beaked whales to study their spatial ecology. They found that the species exhibits both short- and long-term habitat fidelity. The results are published in Frontiers in Conservation Science and show the importance of such studies for marine wildlife conservation.
A mysterious whale species
Beaked whales, a species of toothed whales, make up more than 25% of extant cetaceans (dolphins, porpoises, and whales), but are elusive and notoriously difficult to study. They live in deep waters and stay away ...
In a study funded by National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) researchers examined whether depression, either before or during pregnancy, affects the mother-infant relationship. The research was published today (Tuesday 25 May) in BJPsych Open.
Researchers looked at the quality of mother-infant interactions eight weeks and 12 months after birth in three groups of women; healthy women, women with clinically-significant depression in pregnancy, and women with a lifetime history of depression but healthy pregnancies.
The study used a sample of 131 women: 51 healthy mothers with no current or past depression, 52 mothers with depression referred to the South London and Maudsley ...
