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Abstract
This study examined the connections that the facets of narcissism captured by the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; Raskin & Hall, 1979) and the Pathological Narcissism Inventory (PNI; Pincus et al., 2009) have with self-esteem. This was accomplished by asking 372 participants to complete measures of narcissism and self-esteem level as well as daily diary measures concerning their state self-esteem and daily experiences. Our analyses found that the facets of narcissism differed in their associations with average level of self-esteem, fluctuations in state self-esteem over time, and self-esteem reactions following daily events. These results suggest that it is important to consider specific facets of narcissism when examining feelings of self-worth rather than relying on broader composite measures of narcissistic personality features. Implications of these results for our understanding of the dynamics of the narcissistic personality are discussed.
Notes
To measure self-esteem instability, it is essential that participants complete multiple measures of state self-esteem. As a result, some minimum number of state self-esteem measures must be completed for participants to be included in the analyses. The decision to only include participants in the final analyses who contributed data for at least 4 of the 7 days was established prior to data collection and follows the convention used in previous research (e.g., Zeigler-Hill, Citation2006; Zeigler-Hill & Showers, Citation2007). We found similar results when we included the 42 participants who completed three daily measures, which is the absolute minimum number of observations that could be utilized for these sorts of analyses. We were unable to conduct similar analyses for those participants who only contributed one (n = 74) or two (n = 80) daily reports.
Preliminary analyses found that similar results emerged if self-esteem level was not included in the model (i.e., PNI was also the only significant predictor in the model without self-esteem level, β = .34, t = 4.95, p < .001, d = .52). This suggests that the results reported here are not due to self-esteem level suppressing the associations that other facets of narcissism might have with self-esteem instability. The multilevel models concerning self-esteem reactivity that are reported in later sections also did not differ if self-esteem level was excluded.