Narcissism has encountered a resurgence of theoretical and empirical attention during the last 15 years in personality and social psychology (Emmons, 1987; Rhodewalt & Morf, 1995), due to the development of the NPI.
For more than half a century, the concept of narcissism has been discussed and debated by various groups of scholars (Morf & Rhodewalt, 1993). There is has been extensive theoretical attention; however, the construct has had little empirical examination, largely because it depends on psychoanalytical theory. In earlier research, clinical interest has produced over 1,000 books and articles on the subject, whereas quantitative research in psychology has produced fewer than 50 articles which relate directly to the measurement or empirical exploration of narcissism (Raskin & Terry, 1988). The limited empirical research of the narcissism construct focused on the development of scales to measure narcissism and subsequently focused on validation evidence for one or more of the scales (Emmons, 1984; Raskin & Terry, 1988). For example, in the workplace narcissism has been researched in connection with defective bosses (Carson & Carson, 1998) and ineffective leadership (Sankowsky, 1995).
The attempts to measure narcissism fall into two global categories. The first category includes scales that attempt to measure narcissism as one variable in a taxonomy of several other (Raskin & Terry, 1988). The second category of empirical efforts to measure narcissism includes scales that were developed apart from any taxonomic consideration, where narcissism is the principle variable interest (Raskin & Terry, 1988). Lack of a suitable measuring instrument hampered the empirical study of narcissism until Raskin and Hall (1979) developed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) (Emmons, 1984).
The Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) is used to measure individual differences in narcissism in non-clinical populations.
Raskin and Hall (1979) constructed the NPI forced choice questionnaire. The Narcissistic Personality Inventory is based on the DSM - III criteria (Raskin & Terry, 1988). This criteria include (a) a grandiose sense of self-importance and uniqueness, (b) preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, beauty or ideal love, (c) exhibitionistic – requires constant attention and admiration, (d) entitlement – expectation of special favors without reciprocation and (e) interpersonal exploitiveness (Emmons, 1987). Using the DSM-III criteria for the narcissistic personality, the researchers piloted a list of 220 dichotomous items representing narcissism which was piloted on a sample of undergraduates (Raskin et al., 1979). An internal consistency and item-total correlation strategy was used (Kubarych et al., 2004) which produced the 80 item NPI instrument. In a series of published (Raskin & Hall, 1981) and unpublished follow-up studies, an internal consistency approach was used to produce the 54-item measure of narcissism with high internal consistency (Raskin & Terry, 1988).
Emmons (1984, 1987) performed a principal-component analysis with oblique rotation on the 54-item NPI and extracted four components, which he labelled Leadership/Authority (LA), Superiority/Arrogance (SA), Self-Absorption/Self-Admiration (SS) and Exploitiveness/ Entitlement (EE). Each subscale was composed of 9 – 12 non-overlapping items. Of the Emmons factors, Exploitiveness/Entitlement has been by far the most associated with maladaptive behaviours and psychopathology (Kubarych et al., 2004). According to Emmons (1987), Exploitiveness / Entitlement also correlate with mood variability and intensity. The Superiority/Arrogance subscale, however, correlates significantly with mood variability but not intensity (Emmons, 1987).The highest correlation Emmons (1987) found for the total scale score was with the Selfism Scale. The latter is a 28 item scale and was developed by Phares and Erskine (1998) to measure the construct of selfism. The Leadership/Authority factor (from the Emmons study) has been argued to measure an adaptive form of narcissism (Watson et al., 1992). Following the Emmons study, Raskin and Terry (1988) reviewed Emmons‟s pattern loadings and argued that, since several items loading on the same factors seemed to address different conceptual dimensions, Emmons used a conservative selection criterion in retaining only four factors. They conducted a study within which they performed a principal-components analysis of the
questionnaire. They examined the response characteristics of the 54-item NPI to determine whether each item was monatomic with respect to the overall score. Seven items were dropped because they showed non-monotonic patterns with respect to the overall distribution of the total scale, and negative or near zero correlations with the total scores. Of the 47-item remaining items, a further seven were also dropped because of poor factor loadings, leaving a 40-item NPI which correlated 0.98 with the 54-item NPI (Raskin & Terry, 1988).
The NPI measures narcissism along a continuum, extreme manifestations represent pathological narcissism and the less extreme form reflects a personality trait (Morf et al., 2001). Consistent with the DSM grandiosity characteristics, the NPI correlates positively with high self-reported self esteem (e.g., Emmons, 1984, 1987; Raskin, Novacek & Hogan, 1991; Raskin & Terry, 1988; Rhodewalt & Morf, 1995)and self-focused attention (Emmons, 1987). It is also associated with need for power (Carroll, 1987), and uniqueness (Emmons, 1984), as well as with a lack of discrepancy between the actual and perceived self (Rhodewalt & Morf, 1998). It also correlates positively with hostility (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998; Raskin et al., 1991; Rhodewalt & Morf, 1995). Furthermore, Morf & Rhodewalt (2001) found that people who score high on the NPI will hold positive self-views and also have the most adversarial view of others. Rhodewalt and Morf (1995) also found associations of the NPI with high cynical hostility and antagonism.
The most influential account of normal narcissism conceives the syndrome as a dynamic self-regulatory system aimed at maintaining and creating grandiose views of self (Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001). According to this account, the vulnerability of the narcissistic self drives narcissistic individuals to seek continuous external validation. Baumeister and Vohs (2001) found that narcissistic individuals tend to interpret social situations in terms of their own reflections and protect their self-esteem with self-regulatory strategies accordingly. Rhodewalt and colleagues (1998) (cited in Thomaes, 2007) demonstrated that narcissists‟ self-esteem is much more reactive and subject to fluctuation in response to negative evaluations, than is the self-esteem of less narcissistic individuals. In addition, Smalley and Stake (1996) and Bushman, Baumeister, Thomaes, Ryu, Begeer, and West (2006) found that narcissist react angrily and aggressively to negative evaluations and tend to externalize blame.