Ricerc@Sapienza

In the last decade the Narcissistic Admiration and Rivarly Concept (NARC) was developed, a model that assumes two possible strategies for the regulation of self-grandiosity (i.e., self-enhancement and antagonism). It is worth noting that narcissistic fantasies (e.g., over-estimation of the self and hyper-devaluation of the others) may be difficult to be captured using self-report scales, as they are prone to impression management, self-deception and introspective inability. In the past 30 years, several models of implicit social cognition were developed, along with a series of experimental paradigms designed to measure the spontaneous components of self vs. others evaluations. Of particular interest here is the Relational Responding Task (RRT), a new implicit measure designed to capture, not mere automatic association (like the Implicit Association Test), but actual psychological beliefs. The present project is aimed at applying the Relational Responding Task (RRT) to measure the different facets of narcissism as theorized in the NARC model. Two RRTs (Admiration and Rivarly) and two self-report measures of narcissism will be administered to a sample of university students (about 200 participants), along with a series of scales measuring related constructs (self-esteem, life satisfaction, optimism, pathological personality traits and impression management) and three different self-enhancement measures (Better than average, Over-claiming technique and Self-Perceived Intelligence). Subsequently, it will be investigated the internal consistency, the convergent validity (by examining the correlations between implicit and explicit measures of narcissism), the criterion validity (by examining the correlations of the RRTs with self-report scales of self-esteem, life satisfaction, pathological traits and impression management) and the incremental validity (by examining the unique contributions of the RRTs on self-enhancement indices) of the new implicit measures.