Nehrig, Nicole (5/14) Self-reported mental health of narcissists: illusion or reality? (Philip Wong, Ph.D.; Kevin B. Meehan, Ph.D.;Nicole M. Cain, Ph.D.)
This study applied Shedler, Mayman, & Manis's (1993) "Illusion of Mental Health" model to investigate the relative validity of narcissists' self-reported mental health. A sample of 157 college students from a diverse urban university completed self-report measures to assess level of narcissism and self-reported distress and wrote five early memories, which were coded using the Early Memory Index (EMI) to create an observer-rated measure of distress. Heart rate (HR), systolic blood pressure (SysBP), and self-reported stress were measured during a series of psychologically stressful tasks. Shedler et al.'s (1993) findings were generally replicated. Applying the model, individuals high on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) but not the Hypersensitive Narcissism Scale (HSNS) or the Pathological Narcissism Inventory (PNI) were more often rated as genuinely healthy, whereas those high on the HSNS and PNI were more often rated as manifestly distressed. High NPI-scorers demonstrated no differences in physiological reactivity from baseline compared to high HSNS and high PNI-scorers but showed significantly higher absolute SysBP throughout stress tasks compared to high HSNS-scorers. High NPI-scorers reported significantly less stress than either high HSNS or high PNI-scorers. Individuals scoring high on the NPI and the HSNS or PNI evidenced more distress than those scoring high on the NPI alone, suggesting that while the NPI may assess more adaptive narcissistic features, high scores on the NPI do not necessarily indicate a healthy form of narcissism. An argument is made for the use of multiple measures of narcissism in future research.
