Grandiose and Vulnerable Narcissism and the DSM–5 Pathological Personality Trait Model

Abstract

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Personality Disorders (4th ed., American Psychiatric Association, 2000) personality disorders (PDs) that will be included in the DSM–5 will be diagnosed in an entirely different manner; the explicit criterion sets will be replaced with impairments in self and interpersonal functioning and personality traits from a 25-trait dimensional model of personality pathology. From a trait perspective, narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), the focus of this study, is assessed using 2 specific traits: grandiosity and attention seeking. Using a sample collected online from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk; N = 306), we examined the relations among traits from a new measure of DSM–5's trait model—the Personality Inventory for DSM–5 (PID5; Krueger, Derringer, Markon, Watson, & Skodol, in press)—and grandiose and vulnerable narcissism. The 25 traits from PID5 captured a significant portion of the variance in grandiose and vulnerable factors, although the 2 specific facets designated for the assessment of NPD fared substantially better in the assessment of grandiose rather than vulnerable narcissism. These results are discussed in the context of improving the DSM–5's ability to capture both narcissism dimensions.

Notes

Twenty-one individuals were removed from the original data set (N = 327) due to extensive missing data (i.e., failure to complete one entire measure or more) or obvious invalid responding.

The other option is to jettison one form of narcissism from the DSM–5, a solution that will ignore significant data and clinical experience.